Kelly-Lee Hickey says that the public desire to shut down Dylan Farrow’s disclosures about the childhood sexual abuse she allegedly suffered mirrors the private response met by so many who speak out (including in Hickey’s own experience). And the media sensationalism surrounding it reflects that of the contents of the Little Children Are Sacred report and John Pilger’s documentary Utopia. Childhood sexual abuse is one of the biggest taboos there is - but when we make something taboo, we force the grief of those who experience it underground.
After years of enduring public commentary on the most personal of topics, Dylan Farrow broke the taboo of silence surrounding sexual assault and published an open letter detailing the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, Woody Allen. It can’t have been easy. To speak openly as a survivor is always difficult, even more so when your perpetrator is a celebrity. Her honesty inspired me. After I read her letter I blogged about my own experience in a way that was lucid and empowering. I hoped that such a high profile case would pave the way for discussions about the heart-breaking complexity of child sexual abuse. I was sorely disappointed.
In the days that followed the publication of Farrow’s letter, I grew dizzy with spin. A familiar stench was beginning to rise up from the proverbial basement; the outrage from both camps, the clinical recounting of verifiable ‘facts’ and the pedestalling of legal proceedings mirrored my own experience of disclosing child sexual abuse to my parents at aged 11. Like Farrow, I was met with disgust, rage and disbelief. These reactions, coupled with a clinical adherence to the protocols of legal and welfare bureaucracy, did little to alleviate my profound shame and confusion. The response merely reinforced that I had opened a can of worms that promptly hit the fan and exploded, leaving an inconvenient mess to be mopped up.
The sexual abuse of children remains one of the greatest taboos in our culture. Try raising the subject of pedophilia at a dinner party and see how far that gets you. The culture of silence extends from the ‘Hush now, don’t tell anyone’ pillow talk of perpetrators through to the uncomfortable hand-wringing of social policy makers. There is an ingrained reluctance to actively plough through the deeply complex issues underlying this particularly heinous form of interpersonal trauma. When it does surface, our response is often to push it back into the private sphere, or thrust it into the court room in the hope of swiftly sorting through the polemics, and getting back on with living our lives.
The media response to the Farrow/Allen allegations are not unique. When the Little Children are Sacred report was published in 2007, the response was breathtaking. The 97 nuanced recommendations of the report and its authors were swept aside as a state of emergency was declared. Armies of medical professionals descended upon Aboriginal communities across the Territory, charged with the clinical mission of conducting ‘health checks’ on thousands of Aboriginal children.
Years later the sensationalism continues. By zooming in on the falsified testimony of a youth worker detailing child sex rackets on Aboriginal communities, John Pilger’s recent film Utopia created a dichotomy of either heinous acts beyond belief or a complete absence of any abuse at all. The reality is much more layered than that, with risk to children being a shifting ecology of environmental, social and individual risk factors.The few initiatives seeking to address these root causes of child abuse and neglect receive significantly less coverage (and funding). Nuance makes poor headlines.
Scanning back through the last two weeks of commentary of the Farrow/Allen case I feel overwhelmed with sadness. It strikes me that what I am witnessing is a collective outpouring of grief. The flat-out denialism of Allen’s supporters, the unbridled social media rage and the bargaining style op-eds about whether or not it’s okay to still watch Woody Allen movies resemble the different stages of bereavement outlined in the widely touted Kubler-Ross model of grief.
In a world saturated with feel-good memes and positive pop psychology, grief is an incredibly discomfiting emotion – we loathe it when comes and do all that we can to make it pass as quickly as possible. Grief is amorphous, messy, protracted, but it’s also the appropriate response to something as hurtful as paedophilia. In shunning grief we lose the opportunity to process the hurt we feel, and come to a point of acceptance and new understanding – a place from which we can truly move on.
When we make something taboo, we force the grief of those who experience it underground. To be a survivor of child sexual assault is to have some of your earliest experiences shrouded in stereotyping. There are few avenues for survivors to talk openly about their experiences outside the sanctioned therapeutic spaces of counselling clinics and Reclaim the Night rallies. I believe this silencing acts as one of the most prohibitive barriers to survivor’s healing, and continues to perpetuate a culture in which the abuse of women and children is locked ‘safely’ behind closed doors.
High profile cases, such as Dylan Farrow’s, act as barometers for how we, both individually and collectively, respond to the complexity of trauma. In a geopolitical landscape increasingly divided by the politics of human suffering, we would do well to pay attention to the reading.