A History of Ambivalence and Conflict in the Discursive Construction of the ‘Child Victim’ of Sexual Abuse

Abstract

This article was presented as one of the plenary addresses at the Keele Conference on Gender, Sexuality and Law in June 1998. Speakers were asked to focus on how their own work had developed and changed over time. In my address and in this article these issues are essentially absent because I cannot avoid the conclusion that, in my case at least, the substance of my research is of more interest than reflections upon my intellectual biography. However, this article is, I think, a good example of what I regard as an important strand of my work as a feminist socio-legal theorist and researcher. My work over the last 20 years has moved back and forth between the theoretical (viz. Feminism and the Power of Law [1989]), the empirical (Family Fragments? [1999]) and the historical (Regulating Womanhood [1992]). Sometimes it has even managed to combine all three elements (The Ties That Bind [1982]). There have been moments when I felt that theoretical work was the most important, because of the limits of contemporary analysis or because I felt that my historical or empirical work had given rise to ways of thinking which called for expression in a transferable medium - and theory is always more widely read than empirical or historical work. But at other times I have found the focus on theory to be rather sterile and unrewarding and at such times I have found that empirical work poses new challenges and forces me to think in new ways. My current work on contemporary changes to childhood, for example, is certainly making me reconsider how we should theorise gender in family relationships. Empirical work, in my experience, always changes how one understands the social world. At other times, particularly when the rigours of fieldwork are too demanding, I return to the library and the archives. While fieldwork is exciting and challenging, I find that I am most intellectually contented when I am among original documents. This article emerges from such a period. Historical work challenges our modern complacencies and arrogance, and brings us back in touch with the prolonged difficulties of bringing about social and legal change. It also locates us, as researchers and as sometime agents of change, in an important tradition of endeavour and struggle. The issue of how law deals with sexuality, and indeed the extent to which it is part of the historical and cultural construction of sexual behaviour, has been of interest and concern to me throughout my academic career. I remain convinced that law, understood in its widest meaning, is still one of the most important sites of engagement and counter-discourse.