Giving Voice to Silence: Empowerment and Disempowerment in the Developmental Shift from Trauma ‘Victim’ to ‘Survivor-Advocate’

ABSTRACT

In the past several years, a public conversation in the United States about interpersonal violence has flourished, sustained by the work of advocates who are themselves survivors. This surge in public sharing of trauma stories is a rhetorical form of resistance to ideologies in mainstream American culture that impose silence on survivors (e.g., the “just world” belief). However, the developmental progression from trauma ‘victim’ to empowered public ‘survivor/advocate’ accommodates to dominant American cultural preferences that stories of adversity have a redemptive story line. In a redemptive story, negative experiences are followed by something positive (e.g., personal growth, lessons learned, strength gained). In this paper, we draw from theory and the sparse relevant literature across multiple disciplines to conceptualize when and for whom the redemptive storying of trauma (or, redemptive master narrative) is available, advantageous, and systemically encouraged. Among the proposed advantages of redemptive storying are its psychological health benefits; potential to empower self and others; promotion of meaning-making, mission, and communal solidarity; and the larger social/political changes that can emerge from giving voice to silenced experiences. Proposed challenges to redemptive storying include layers of societal oppression and marginalization that shape the redemption stories of many survivor-advocates; ongoing connection to or dependence on relationships and communities that enable abuse; and the reality of historical trauma and other forms of intergenerational trauma, which complicate the linear, individualistic story of redemption. With this theory-driven framework, we wish to promote compassion for survivors, along with interdisciplinary, inclusive, and intersectional research in this understudied area.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal violence
• gender-based violence
• sexual violence
• sociocultural differences
• development
• social systems
• survivors
• trauma disclosure
• trauma risk and resiliency

Notes

¹ For example, the turn of the 21^st century saw a surge in allegations of child sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy, along with increased media attention to the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church (Cheit, Shavit, & Reiss-Davis, 2010).

² At a very basic level these ideas are consistent with McAdams’ (McAdams & Guo, 2015) findings that those who have more redemptive life stories are also more generative. He argues that being generative is hard work, and stories of redemption can sustain that hard work. But this work is not trauma-specific.

³ Allison’s experiences are consistent with the predictions of cultural betrayal trauma theory, a framework for understanding within-group trauma in minority populations (Gómez, 2018). Gómez writes: “(Intra)cultural pressure includes pressure from other minorities not to disclose [within-group] trauma for fear that it would reflect negatively on the minority group and even lead to societal trauma, such as unfair treatment in the judicial system. Therefore, (intra)cultural pressure can be conceptualized as a mechanism of protection against the harm of societal trauma. Unfortunately, it is a strategy that privileges the perceived needs of the perpetrator(s) and/or minority group over the needs of the victims of cultural betrayal trauma” (Gómez, 2018, p. 2).

⁴ For a description of the advocacy role of AI/AN women survivors in contributing to the Congressional reinstatement of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, see Deer (2015), in the section “Speaking truth: Native women fight back,” from The Beginning and the End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native Communities. In this landmark work, Deer also describes AI/AN women’s stories of surviving sexual violence as an essential “part of rape reform […]” (2015). She continues: “Indeed, there are accounts of the power of a single woman’s story to effect change [in tribal responses to rape] within her tribal government. Reclaiming and understanding these stories are critical in developing a meaningful legal structure that is responsive to the real experiences of contemporary indigenous women. The stories of survivors are stories of despair and pain but also of strength and survival” (Deer, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Department of Psychology, Western Washington University.