Dr Dave McDonald, a faculty member from the Criminology department of the University of Melbourne, will be giving a seminar for the interdisciplinary Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality on “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”’: Child Sex Abuse, and the Translation from Theory to Policy’ at 15.15 on Wednesday 11th May in Eliot Lyons room.
The event is run by the Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality.
Contact Dr Marian Duggan for further information. Email m.c.duggan@kent.ac.uk
The abstract for this event provided by Dr McDonald is as follows::-
Across the United Kingdom, Australia, North America and elsewhere, increased recognition has recently been placed on the widespread prevalence of institutionalised child sex abuse. In this presentation, I seek to locate this recent transformation in understanding child sex abuse within a recent history of feminist debates about incest dating back to the 1970s. In doing so, I offer a critical account of the transitions that can be witnessed through this time, and the political dimensions that underpin these. Whereas second wave feminists argued that normative masculinity was a key criterion in explaining such harm, throughout the 1980s and 1990s this was replaced by a phenomenon of disavowal in which paedophiles were popularly imagined as dangerous, other and distinct to ‘us’. As comforting as this may have been, it nonetheless functioned to obscure the more routine scenarios in which such abuse occurs. While a greater appreciation of the role of institutions in producing, overlooking, facilitating or condoning child sex abuse is to be welcomed, I consider the extent to which this offers a more fully realised understanding of its prevalence. In doing so, I consider recent quasi-legal mechanisms of investigation and redress, with a particular emphasis on the questions they raise in terms of justice, affect and proximity.