Resistance and Reconstruction: Older Women Talk about Childhood Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Research which explores the experiences of women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse is, in the main, focused on young and middle-aged women. Recognition of their perspectives is limited in academic literature.Ostensibly, this reflects broader social issues of ageism. This study uses a feminist research approach to explore the personal stories of 16 Australian women aged 57 years and older who have experienced childhood sexual abuse. It aims to feature their views and social contexts in light of how they managed the impact of childhood sexual abuse during their lives.The concepts of resistance and reconstruction have been developed as a basis for a thematic analysis of how the women have made sense of their experiences. Often, normative discourse regarding older women is negative or the nature of their lives marginalised, and this research aims to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of their perspectives, and to also provide a space for their insights to be recognised. In sharing their stories, the women contribute to knowledge regarding the patterns of gender and age-based inequality and how they enact agency in constructing subjectivities in difficult life circumstances. Furthermore, this project attempts to contribute to professional knowledge by developing anti-ageist practices for social work and human service workers. managing childhood sexual abuse. It is recognition that their stories are important:… because, so often in our history, events, however major their ramifications, occur at the level of the molecular, the minor, the little and the mundane. (Rose 1999, p. 11).In speaking about themselves and the issue of childhood sexual abuse, the women demonstrate how, at the level of the everyday, powerful and nuanced resistances and reconstructions work to challenge normalising discourse regarding gender, age and recovery. Fundamentally, I hoped to represent the narratives of the women in a way which did justice to their efforts to participate in the research and, most importantly, to their bold, undaunted and daring approaches which were sometimes humorous and optimistic, but oftentimes painful and confronting.

Leisure as a Space of Political Practice in Middle East Women Life Writings

“…Recent feminist leisure research has recognized leisure time and activities as potential sites where unequal gender ideologies can be challenged, subverted and re-inscribed (Du, 2008;Kostecki, 2015). Much of this scholarship, however, is carried out from modernist theoretical position which retains the binary of dominant and subordinate, equating power with domination and conceptualizing resistance as acts of opposition carried out against the existing relations of power (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004;Raby, 2005).…”