@recovery-histories
Recovery Histories is a project that investigates the histories of child sexual abuse, trauma and recovery in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales (1950s to present day). It is co-produced with survivors and practitioners and funded by Wellcome.
📢 Event:
Join Dr Ruth Beecher, Dr Claudia Soares and guest speaker Professor Harry Ferguson in tracing the history and sociology of child protection from the 1880s to present day.
📆 Wednesday 4 March 26
⏰ 12:00–1:30pm
💻 Online
Sign up Here: www.childprotectionprofessionals.org.uk/events/speci...
Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh and Dr Gabriel Lawson, the lead organisers, wrote a a blog about it. They report on findings and recommendations for historians.
You can read the blog here: blog.royalhistsoc.org/2025/12/17/l...
The workshop involved scholars from King’s College London, SOAS, Royal Holloway, Birkbeck and the Black Cultural Archives, and members of the Lived Experience Advisory Board at the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health.
Earlier this year, we took part in a workshop on Lived Experience and Historical Research at King’s College London.
More to come in a longer blog post!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
This article explores how credibility and doubt are performed in child sexual abuse trials.
I have been re-reading it to think about how doubt is performed outside the courts, within the research, in everyday life.
Doubt and credibility are produced through harmful and discriminatory stereotypes that are routinely enacted in courts, the media, and interpersonal relationships. Believability requires performance and is contingent upon victims’ positionality.
What is the opposite of doubt? Is truth-as-evidence an adequate response to uncertain memories? What alternative responses—both at the level of research and more broadly—might be envisaged? Can community and listening serve present such alternatives to the demand for truth-as-evidence?
After repeatedly responding ‘I am not the police’ to participants’ expressions of doubt, in order to reassure them that ‘proof’ was not a prerequisite for taking their experiences seriously, I have begun to ask: what kind of feminist response can be offered to doubt?
Memories of sexual violence are at times presented as dubious and as such requiring proof. Yet such proof is not always attainable: physical evidence is no longer obtainable, and certain doubts will remain unresolved due to the refusal of perpetrators or their accomplices to acknowledge the abuse.
One question recurs throughout the ethnography: my interlocutors frequently express doubts about the ‘truth’ of their memories, which are often incomplete, fragmented, absent, or discredited. Some question their eligibility to participate due to gaps in their recollections.
Yesterday we posted posters and cards to survivors’ organisations across Ireland, Wales, Scotland & England with the hope that we will reach people who are not on social media and who might like to record their oral histories with us. We will preserve them & value them. Let us know if you can help.
Beyond labels slide on a screen with a no photos or videos image
Today it was our Beyond Labels workshop. Dr Lucy Johnstone & I worked with attendees to reframe the narrative - looking at an alternative approach to medicalising trauma. Everyone was very engaged, and discussion was valuable.
#SideBySideCSA
#16daysofactivism #csa @recovery-histories.bsky.social
Survivors: Help us to find out about the different ways survivors of child sexual abuse have understood trauma and found ways of living with the impact of child sexual abuse. We will
recognise, value and preserve your experiences.
Web: shra.bbk.ac.uk/blog/recovery-history-oral-history/
If you are an adult survivor of child sexual abuse and you are interested in recording your oral history and would like to know more, we'd love to hear from you.
We want to reach as many survivors as we can. If you can, please share in your networks.
#csa #oralhistory #VAWG #research #history
📢Your Story Matters: Help Preserve Survivors' History.
We are recording the oral histories of survivors of child sexual abuse. These personal stories are invaluable-they give voice to histories that might otherwise be lost.
Read more here: shra.bbk.ac.uk/blog/recover...
If you're a practitioner interested in how history can help shape practice today, we'll be sharing details on how you can sign up to the next AOCPP History and Practice Special Interest Group soon!
Why does history matter to current child protection practice?
In this blog @katekatewilson.bsky.social reflects on first meeting of the new AOCPP Special Interest Group (SIG), History & Practice, which was hosted by Caring Communities and the Recovery History projects.
while also opening space to ‘imagine the full panoply of creativity and innovativeness that may sustain a violence-free future’.
Moving beyond this binary carries significant epistemological and political implications. Indeed, ‘pushing beyond institutional frameworks’ may enable scholars to better ‘represents the fullness of those experiences and the complexities of gender as a source of vulnerability’,
Rethinking temporalities and geographies allows anthropologists to shift away from a ‘focus on moments of violence’, a preoccupation embedded in legal and criminal justice institutions, which structures interventions without ‘bringing an end to suffering or gendered vulnerabilities’.
Following a review of the existing literature, Mulla traces how anthropologists have sought to move beyond this binary by considering the various temporalities and geographies that shape the experiences of victim-survivors beyond interventionist logics.
and limits the understanding of ‘the structural conditions that capacitate gender-based harm’.
She examines the binary distinction between ‘domestic violence’ and ‘sexual assault’. This binary, which emerges from anthropological analyses of institutional interventions, tends to render domestic violence and sexual assault mutually exclusive phenomena
One of our advisory board members, Sameena Mulla, has published a new paper!
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
—violence that has been enabled by the Israeli government and largely disregarded by feminists in the Global North.
This is also pertinent within settler colonial contexts. In her discussion of the “Israel exemption,” ethnic studies scholar Nada Elia analyses how Israeli soldiers have perpetrated sexual violence against Palestinian adults, young people and children (...)
Child sexual abuse also functions as a mechanism for enforcing settler colonialism.
As activists, survivors, and researchers have long observed, the taboo surrounding child sexual abuse concerns the act of speaking about CSA rather than the abuse itself.
