Face to Face with Child Abuse: Towards an Ethics of Listening

Abstract

This paper is concerned with faces. It is concerned with the face of a sexually abused seven years old child -- with my face -- and with the marginalisation and violation of children’s own subjective experiences of abuse by the law. Drawing upon my own subjective experience of sexual abuse as a young child, silenced for twenty-five years, I interpret my own sexual abuse as a profound experience of ‘homelessness’. To be homeless is to lack a primal place in the world, to be in a permanent state of disorientation, to be displaced. To be homeless is not necessarily to be emotionally insecure, but to be voiceless. Accordingly, the subject of sexual abuse is an emotionally dislocated subject and I interpret my own abuse in terms of an enduring experience of the violation of place. In other words, I would argue that the physical act of sexual abuse is less important than the site or place of abuse. The significance of sexual abuse is that it reveals the homelessness of our own sojourn and the poverty of our own subjectivity. Given this interpretation, I find the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child problematic and I attempt to think child sexual abuse in ethical terms. Following Emmanuel Levinas, I present sexual abuse in terms of the ethical significance of the face-to-face relationship and I argue that rights-based advocacy must listen to what children say. It must think through what listening to that voice entails in ethical terms.