Personal narratives, public risk: using Foucault’s ‘confessional’ to examine adult retrospective disclosures of childhood abuse

Abstract

Disclosure of childhood sexual abuse is a process that is often laden with boundary testing, decision-making and, at times, risk. Disclosures tend to be delayed, often into adulthood and later life, with disclosures to authorities remaining relatively low. In the Republic of Ireland adults who disclose experiences of childhood sexual abuse are directed towards child protection services due to an interplay between jurisprudence, child protection policy design, and mandatory reporting obligations, requiring social work practitioners to balance the social and the legal. This article compares Foucault’s concept of the confessional to current social work practices of engaging with adult victims and survivors of abuse. It is argued that thinking about these interactions as a confessional-like system highlights a process of knowledge creation that is taking place when a personal narrative of abuse is shared, willingly or via mandated reporting, with a child protection agency under the auspices of a modern state. This ‘confessional-lens’ helps us identify a tipping of the balance in this area of social work practice, away from provision of care and person-centredness, across a boundary, to legalistic practice. Narratives of childhood abuse are transformed into knowledge deemed necessary to assess current risk to children. A process that places the adult on the periphery, leading to a potential for harm and re-traumatisation.

Keywords:

• Disclosure
• child protection
• social work
• Foucault
• sexual abuse
• risk

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Dr Ailise Bulfin, University College Dublin, for her invitation to present an early version of this paper at an international seminar on cultural representations of child sexual abuse which gave the author opportunity to develop the arguments outlined in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is important to note that this paper draws upon Foucault’s writings to discuss child sexual abuse and specifically disclosure. That said, it would be remiss not to highlight that there have been reports alleging Foucault’s sexual abuse of children during his time in Tunisia (Guesmi, 2021). This raises potential ethical questions for the author and others using his theories and his work, particularly in the realm of sexual abuse.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.