Internalization and Opposition to Stigmatized Social Discourse among Incest Survivors

ABSTRACT

Despite the high prevalence of incest, survivors are reluctant to disclose its existence for reasons such as shame, guilt and the presence of an accusatory and stigmatizing social discourse. The current mixed methods study examined the internal discourses of 13 incest survivors in Israel, reflected in self-reported internal dialogs which emerged during interviews. The qualitative analysis revealed a dialectical tension between two themes – one reflecting an internalization of the social discourse (manifested as quotes taken from social discourse and uttered by the survivors) and the other an agentic discourse (manifested in utterances either resisting the social discourse or showing an empowering advertence to one’s own fulcrum). The quantitative analysis showed that for seven participants the internalized social discourse expressions were most frequent, for five the agentic expressions were most frequent, and that for one the discourses were at equilibrium. The ubiquitous sub-themes manifested in the internalized social discourse were: victimhood (feelings of vulnerability and helplessness), survivorship (meaningless existence, despair and hopelessness), negative self-esteem and self-pathology (perception of the self as having pathological psychological problems), and denial/repression of the abuse. The ubiquitous sub-themes manifested in the agentic discourse were: positive self-image and sense of potency, hope, optimism and positive perception of life, and uprising against the parents and institutions that did not give support. The discussion is based on Butler’s concept of vulnerability, which suggests how to address the harms inflicted by incest without erasing aspects of the survivors’ agency and growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Incest survivors
• social discourse
• stigmas
• victim blaming
• agency

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to each one of the women who participated in this study for trusting us and for their willingness to share their body-mind experiences as incest survivors. This article is part of the lead author’s dissertation which was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Gender Studies Program of Bar-IlanUniversity, Israel.

Notes

¹ Since this study focuses on female survivors of incest, female pronouns will be used, although incest harms both girls and boys (Fraenkel, 2019).

² The authors have strong reservations regarding the terminology of victim/survivor; however, and these are used for lack of better terms describing a process of coping with rather than a fixed state.

³ Abbreviation for no. of appearances/no. of participants. For example: X = 158 appearances for Y = 10 participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Efrat Shaked

Dr Efrat Shaked holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Bar-Ilan University. Her research deals with the physical-mental experience of women coping with incest, following the participation in a specialized therapeutic running group. She focuses on the changes in the web of relationships between the different parts of the self and the changes in the inner discourses in the face of the public discourse in Israel. Efrat works as a Body-Psychotherapist and a supervisor in a private clinic. She teaches mindful running and therapeutic running at the Wingate Institute - the national institute for sport excellence. She is a supervisor as part of the practicum for graduate students in the department of Counseling and Human Development at Haifa University.

Moshe Bensimon

Dr Moshe Bensimon is a professor in the Department of Criminology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. As a music therapists, his fields of research include music therapy with traumatized victims; music and music therapy in prison; aggression, crime and music; and posttraumatic stress disorder among victims. His fields of research include group music therapy with people coping with trauma and PTSD, and music/music therapy in prisons. Prof. Bensimon is Director of the Forum for Qualitative Research at Bar-Ilan University. For information about his publications, see https://criminology.biu.ac.il/en/bensimonm.

Rivka Tuval Mashiach

Dr Rivka Tuval-Mashiach is the chair of the Gender graduate Program, a clinical psychologist and a full professor in the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her fields of expertise include: resilience, identity challenges and identity re-construction in coping with trauma and illness, trauma and gender, sexual trauma, women's psychological development throughout the life cycle, and women's mental health and wellbeing. Her research aims to bridge between theoretical models and applied as well as therapeutic approaches. In the last several years, she focuses on trauma narratives, at both the individual and collective levels. Prof. Rivka Tuval- Mashiach uses qualitative as well as mixed methods in her research. She has published numerous papers and co-authored the books Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis and Interpretation (Sage, 1998, with Professor Amia Lieblich and Dr. Tammar Zilber) and Narrative Research: Theory, Interpretation and Creation, in Hebrew, with Dr. Gabriella Spector-Mersel.