Useful bits and interesting bobs, No. 12
It's time for the last Useful Bits and Interesting Bobs of the academic year. And this week, it's the first one that comes courtesy of one of our wonderful subscribers...
*NB This article is about a podcast interview which covers sexual abuse of children. As such both this piece, and the interview it discusses, contain potentially highly distressing content.
Ok, the truth is I don’t normally go in for personal accounts from people that have survived abuse. It’s not because I don’t think that they’re important or valuable. It’s just that I feel like my job already consumes enough psychological and emotional labour from me, and so reading or watching more things that are very depressing is something I try to avoid. I’m really sorry if that sounds selfish, but I’m just being honest.
But this podcast interview with sexual abuse survivor and ex-footballer Paul Stewart (watch below or listen here) was recommended to me by Helen Rigelsford (a wonderful subscriber to theDSLblog, thanks again for getting in touch Helen), so I gave it a go. And I have to say, whilst I definitely did not ‘enjoy’ listening to it, it did give me some very valuable reflections:
He talks very powerfully about the importance of remembering that ‘teenagers’ - or ‘young people’ - who are the victims of abuse, are in fact ‘children’, and we should call them that. This is in keeping with the growing trend to highlight the massive power imbalance whenever people that age interact with actual adults. And the fact that what might sometimes look like willing or complicit behaviours is in fact just exploitation and abuse working in very malign ways.
Following on from that, he gives a vivid account of the way that grooming worked in his case. What I found really striking here was his description of the way that his abuser effectively groomed his whole family to enable the abuse. This raises really challenging questions about the complex way in which parents and carers fit into stories of abuse. How have they failed to protect? Where does responsibility lie, and where should the feelings of guilt go? What is the fall-out for families, when a child has experienced sexual abuse from someone outside the family home? Whilst every case is specific, I’m guessing it is usually very messy and very painful.
The other thing he dispels really well is the myth of the groomer as a ‘weirdo in a trench coat’. He explains how in his case his abuser was in fact a hideously ‘smooth operator’. It is truly gut-wrenching to hear the careful and purposeful way in which his abuser groomed him into a victim, and then maintained that dynamic. He manages to portray how totalising the experience must have been, and the overwhelming scale of the impact, that lasted long after the abuse stopped. And throughout, the biggest clue to the outside world of what he was going through would have been his emotional withdrawal as he struggled to cope.
And finally, he offers a beacon of hope as well. He talks about how the ‘No such thing as can’t’ attitude that had served him well in football had not been helpful in building a life after suffering abuse. What has clearly made a difference to him has been discovering an extraordinary coping mechanism: doing good things in the world. That is a remarkable and humbling and message for us all.
You can check out Paul’s website here and the Safeguarding Fundamentals website here.