Abstract
In this chapter I draw upon Alice Miller’s notion of the ‘enlightened witness’ to explore whether an empathic oral history interviewer can take on this role. To illustrate this, I use my experience of conducting oral history interviews with adults who were in foster care as children, adults who in my presence connected with the wounded child within. I came to realise I was doing more than collecting their story for a research project, I was acting as an ‘enlightened witness.’
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Notes
- 1.
Forgotten Australians is a term used for those Australian-born citizens who were in out of home care during the twentieth century and who were the subject of a 2004 Federal Government Senate Inquiry. The term, coined in the title of the Senate Inquiry report, Forgotten Australians: A Report on Australians Who Experienced Institutional or Out-of-Home Care as Children, is a contested one; not everyone to whom it applies accepts it. The report can be found online at https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/report/index.
- 2.
Facebook, “Brian Cherrie,” (2018).
- 3.
Government Compensation Payments Review, “Submission 26 Brian Cherrie,” ed. Parliamentary Business (Canberra, ACT: Australian Government, 2010).
- 4.
Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 80.
- 5.
Miller, Body Never Lies, 23, 27; Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, 49.
- 6.
For a history of inquiries into the institutional care of Australian children, see Shurlee Swain, History of Inquiries Reviewing Institutions Providing Care for Children (Sydney: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2014). The first national history of foster care in Australia has only recently been published: Nell Musgrove and Deidre Michell, The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia: Just Like a Family? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 7.
The Long History of Foster Care Project was funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Nell Musgrove from the Australian Catholic University (ACU). The oral history interviews being used for this chapter were conducted in accordance with the ethics requirements of the ACU and the University of Adelaide. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and are stored at the University of Adelaide. Transcriptions were returned to interviewees for review and correction. Pseudonyms are used except where participants have requested their own names be used. Quotations from participants have been edited for length, that is, content not directly relevant to the current discussion has been deleted and this is indicated by ellipses.
- 8.
Benno Herzog, “Invisibilization and Silencing as an Ethical and Sociological Challenge,” Social Epistemology 32, no. 1 (2018), 13, 16; Miranda Fricker, “Silence and Institutional Prejudice,” Oxford Scholarship Online (2012).
- 9.
Pranee Liamputtong, Researching the Vulnerable (London, UK: Sage, 2007), 7–8. Also see Karen Willis, “Analysing Qualitative Data,” in Social Research Methods, ed. Maggie Walter (South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press, 2013), 328–329.
- 10.
The term “survivor-researcher” is rarely used in academic literature, a few examples being L. Ellingson, “‘Then You Know How I Feel’: Empathy, Identification and Reflexivity in Fieldwork,” Qualitative Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1998); M. Gilfus, “The Price of the Ticket: A Survivor-Centered Appraisal of Trauma Theory,” Violence Against Women 5, no. 11 (1999); N. Rengganis, “Reflections of an Earthquake-Survivor Researcher,” in Cultural Psychology of Coping with Disasters, ed. M. Zaumseil et al. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2014).
- 11.
I have written in other places about grieving the loss of my birth family and of how moving through stages of loss, rage and acceptance have been painful, but freeing, see for example Deidre Michell, “Putting Down Roots,” in Women Journeying with Spirit, ed. Deidre Michell and Jude Noble (Port Adelaide, SA: Ginninderra Press, 2010); Ways of the Wicked Witch (Elizabeth, SA: People’s Voice Publishing, 2012), 5–6. I have also written of the emotional benefits that come with understanding the social and political roots of childhood experiences, see for example Dee Michell, “Academia as Therapy,” in Women Activating Agency in Academia, ed. Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis (London, UK: Routledge, 2018). It is not unusual for oral historian interviewers to have an affinity with their interviewees, see for example, Pamela Sugiman, “I Can Hear Lois Now,” in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, ed. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 150.
- 12.
For a discussion on the importance of trust in interviews, see for example, Sean Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration,” Oral History 34, no. 1 (2006), 36.
- 13.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, trans. Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum, 4th ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), xi, ix; Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, trans. Simon Worrall (London: Virago, 1997), 18, 37; H. Fraser et al., “Working-Class Women Study Social Science Degrees: Remembering Enablers and Detractors,” Higher Education Research & Development 35, no. 4 (2016).
- 14.
Miller, For Your Own Good, xi, ix; Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, 18, 37; Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv, 128; Fraser et al., “Working-Class Women Study Social Science Degrees: Remembering Enablers and Detractors”; Sue Cowan-Jenssen, “Alice Miller Obituary,” The Guardian, 2010.
- 15.
Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 168.
- 16.
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 2; Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 44, 143; The Truth Will Set You Free, 40. Influential trauma specialist, Judith Herman, says that it is usual for trauma events to be cast out of consciousness, and that “remembering and telling the truth” are needed for healing, see Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1.
- 17.
Miller, The Untouched Key (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 85.
- 18.
Miller, For Your Own Good, 6.
- 19.
Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, xi, 17, 44, 48, 151.
- 20.
Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, 164; Judith Burchardt, “Appendix,” British Journal of General Practice 57, no. 541 (2007).
- 21.
Miller, Banished Knowledge. Facing Childhood Injuries, 164; The Truth Will Set You Free, 25; James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth, Opening Up by Writing It Down, 3rd ed. (New York: Guildford Press, 2016); Louise DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). Also see D. Capps, “Speaking of Silence,” Pastoral Psychology 60, no. 5 (2011).
- 22.
For example, see Fraser et al., “Working-Class Women Study Social Science Degrees.”
- 23.
Neal R. Norrick, “Talking About Remembering and Forgetfulness in Oral History Interviews,” Oral History Review 32, no. 2 (2005); Amy Dayton-Wood et al., “Bridging Gaps and Preserving Memories through Oral History Research and Writing,” The English Journal 101, no. 4 (2012); Linda Shopes, “‘Insights and Oversights’: Reflections on the Documentary Tradition and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014); Alistair Thomson, “Digital Aural History: An Australian Case Study,” Oral History Review 43 (2016); Ruth Martin, “Oral History in Social Work Education; Chronicling the Black Experience,” Journal of Social Work History 23, no. 3 (1987); Linda Shopes, “When Women Interview Women,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 1 (1994); “‘Insights and Oversights’.”
- 24.
See for example William Tierney, “Undaunted Courage: Life History and the Postmodern Challenge,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000); Alan Wong, “Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview,” in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, ed. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’.”
- 25.
Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’,” 37–40.
- 26.
Martha Norkunas makes this point too, that because of the emotional content and context, there is often an element of the therapeutic in oral history interviews, see Martha Norkunas, “The Vulnerable Listener,” in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, ed. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 83.
- 27.
Tierney, “Undaunted Courage,” 540. For example, Janice Konstantinidis writes at the beginning of her testimony into life in a Magdalene Laundry that it is important to commit her story to the public record in the hope “that no child now or in the future ever has to experience the horror I did.” See Janice Konstantinidis, “Life in ‘the Mag,’” Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 24 (2013), 91; Kathy Ahern, “Informed Consent; Are Researchers Accurately Representing Risks and Benefits?,” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 26, no. 4 (2012), 675.
- 28.
Tierney, “Undaunted Courage,” 545.
- 29.
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1995), 82.
- 30.
Johnny Saldana, Thinking Qualitatively (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2015), 82–84.
- 31.
Tierney, “Undaunted Courage,” 544. For a similar observation, also see Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’,” 36. And, as Tierney goes on to say, in the text narrators are presented as more grammatically correct and coherent than their narratives in the “raw.” I agree with Linda Shopes that having the concrete and particular of people’s stories conform to academic styles of writing is “odd.” See Shopes, “‘Insights and Oversights’: Reflections on the Documentary Tradition and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History,” 264.
- 32.
This is not unusual for one who might be described as a “vulnerable listener.” See Norkunas, “The Vulnerable Listener,” 81. Sean Field might call this “sensing the mood”, that is taking into account “what is said, how it is said and what is not said,” Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’,” 36.
- 33.
See for example Wong, “Listen and Learn,” 99.
- 34.
Perhaps using the exercises suggested by Martha Norkunas, “Teaching to Listen: Listening Exercises and Self-Reflexive Journals,” Oral History Review 38, no. 1 (2011).
- 35.
Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, 24, 121. According to R.W. Connell, Doug is not unusual amongst men of his demographic; working-class men who have been subjected to considerable violence as children and who in turn become violent. Some men then condone violence against women, others do not, see Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 98–103. Physical violence against children has usually been framed as for “their own good”: Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, 57. For more on the history of physically punishing children, see Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment (New York: Penguin Random House, 1992); James Boyce, Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Carlton, VIC: Black, 2014).
- 36.
In this instance I found it easy to empathise with Doug although I did not condone his violent behaviour, a fear raised by Carrie Hamilton that it may be too easy to identify with those who have done harm, see “On Being a ‘Good’ Interviewer: Empathy, Ethics and the Politics of Oral History,” Oral History 36, no. 2 (2008), 42.
- 37.
Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, 3.
- 38.
Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, 96; Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, 44, 143.
- 39.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 193–194.
- 40.
Tierney, “Undaunted Courage,” 545.
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Michell, D. (2019). Oral Histories and Enlightened Witnessing. In: Moruzi, K., Musgrove, N., Pascoe Leahy, C. (eds) Children’s Voices from the Past. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11896-9_9
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