Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Review.We need to have confidence in our ability to read and interpret. Rather than believe in 'experts' who imply they know it all, we must look for the gaps and the hidden agendas. If knowledge and power go hand in hand, it is the responsibility of feminists both to acquire knowledge and to transform it. (Cameron and Frazer 1987: xv) In all the storm of words about child sexual abuse, there has been a deafening silence on why it happens. This is strange. For, finding a meaning is a central concern of everyone touched by child sexual abuse. Why did it happen?, why did he do it? are questions which obsessively preoccupy sufferers of abuse and their relatives. The abusers who can accept some responsibility for their actions also struggle to find answers.Child sexual abuse is also at the centre of many ideological debates, bringing together as it does sexuality and the family; yet, the debates seldom address why child sexual abuse occurs. Rather, anyone with an issue to explore or a point to make attaches child sexual abuse to it as the clinching argument. Seabrooke, in the New Statesman (1987), adopts it to argue the debauchery of the market economy; Labour MP Stuart Bell, the integrity of the north-east working-class family; critics and apologists of psychoanalysis use it to attack or defend; James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, to argue for more repressive policing and draconian sentencing.Why then is there evident in political, professional and journalistic writings, such a curious absence of discussion on why abuse occurs? The answer should come as no surprise to feminists; it enables an avoidance of the most glaring feature of child sexual abuse: it is something that, overwhelmingly, men do to children. The men come from every social class, and from all kinds of families and cultures; they are brothers, All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Challenging the Orthodoxy 17 confuse uncles, babysitters, friends, strangers, grandfathers, stepfathers and fathers. They have in common that they are men, but little else that,we know. Very little attention has been paid to studying them, and none to the study of non-abusive men.Interestingly, the focus of frantic study and hypothesis are the children who are abused, the families they come from and, more than almost anything else, the women who are their mothers. One particular theoretical approach, family dysfunction theory, has, in locating child sexual abuse in 'problem families', dominated lay and professional discourse and achieved the status of common sense. Its main attribute, certainly not logic,...

Discourses of Children's Participation: Professionals, Policies and Practices

“…Feminists earlier challenged interventions and policies relating to child sexual abuse (Campbell, 1988;Macleod and Saraga, 1988;Kelly et al, 1991;Saraga, 1993). Within the policy texts, it seems that the idea of working in partnership with 'parents' is offered as a less controversial way forward.…”

Psychopathology as Social Construction: The Case of Anorexia Nervosa

“…He "argued that the impairment in the nutritional instinct was related to the organism's disability to come to terms with sexual excitation" (Hepworth, 1999, pp. 48-49), a statement that inspired many neo-Freudian theorists to connect self-starvation to the postponement of womanhood, symbolizing the rejection of femininity (Dally & Gomez, 1979;MacLeod & Saraga, 1988). This can be seen as resulting from real or fantasized sexual abuse or, more simply, from a conflicted, ambivalent relationship with the mother, the dispenser of good and bad nourishment.…”

Family in Dutch migration policy 1945–2005

“…Since the 1980s, authors have for this reason objected to the use of a victimhood discourse in issues concerning women, minorities or minority women (for a summary, see: Leod & Saraga, 1988). They have convincingly argued that this discourse placed people who are portrayed as 'victims' at a disadvantage rather than helped them.…”