Deconstructing the “Pedagogy of Abuse”: Teaching Child Sexual Abuse Narratives

Abstract

In “The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss,” Elizabeth Marshall reveals how Harrison’s controverstal 1997 memoir of adult incest “tutors the reader about a `pedagogy of abuse’ that underpins familiar cultural narratives” (405). Specifically, looking at fairy tales about father—daughter incest, Harrison confronts “the moral and behavioral edict” that has asserted the daughter “invites and is responsible for the father’s sexual violence” (405).² This long-taught cultural lesson is generally referred to today as “blaming the victim.”³ In the 1960s and 1970s, activists and writers in the Women’s Movement fought to re-educate American society and restructure US laws to acknowledge culpability by prosecuting perpetrators of sex crimes instead of further victimizing the survivors. Since that period, sexual abuse narratives have had a powerfully liberating effect on writers and readers, particularly women. This literature has also offered English teachers the opportunity to confront the social problem of sexual abuse in a public educative forum, rather than continuing to leave out of the curriculum what for the individual survivor is often still the silenced, shameful, and isolating story of rape or child sexual abuse.

go into the poem the HEART of it beating ….

—Sapphire, PUSH ¹