A Role for the Storytellers

Abstract

To say that women construct and reconstruct stories which feature childhood sexual abuse as an organising principle is not to argue that they are creating works of fiction but to indicate the degree of choice they have and are able to exercise in constructing life stories that not only make sense of their lives but might also act as guides for living. The current orthodoxy on childhood sexual abuse constructs victims as inevitably damaged and in need of healing and this has allowed women’s unhappiness and dissatisfaction to be reinterpreted as evidence of abuse and ‘symptoms’ of abuse to be identified in the lives of adult women. It is these ‘alternative memories’ that form the basis of many women’s sexual abuse narratives and this book has attempted to explore the active role some women play in constructing their own biographies, based on such memories, in the process of making sense of their lives. They may have been constrained by stories that can be told and the narrative frameworks available to them (Bauman 2001, Gergen 1994, Plummer 1995, 2001) but they were nonetheless actively engaged in constructing their own stories — stories which owe more to our contemporary storying of childhood sexual abuse and those narrative frameworks currently in circulation than they do to the recovery of memories.