Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self

by Joseph E. Davis

Since a new sensitivity and orientation to victims of injustice arose in the 1960s, categories of victimization have proliferated. Large numbers of people are now characterized and characterize themselves as sufferers of psychological injury caused by the actions of others. In contrast with the familiar critiques of victim culture, Accounts of Innocence offers a new and empirically rich perspective on the question of why we now place such psychological significance on victimization in people's lives.

Focusing on the case of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, Joseph E. Davis shows how the idea of innocence shaped the emergence of trauma psychology and continues to inform accounts of the past (and hopes for the future) in therapy with survivor clients. His findings shed new light on the ongoing debate over recovered memories of abuse. They challenge the notion that victim accounts are an evasion of personal responsibility. And they suggest important ways in which trauma psychology has had unintended and negative consequences for how victims see themselves and for how others relate to them.

An important intervention in the study of victimization in our culture, Accounts of Innocence will interest scholars of clinical psychology, social work, and sociology, as well as therapists and victim activists.

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Michael J.J. Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a startlingly insightful book. Works like this make sociology an actual science. Like a great scientist, the author is using a restrained empiricism to try to answer some very difficult questions that no one has tried to answer before. Or rather, no one has tried to answer the questions like this, in a careful, investigative way. This is not just another work in which an author tries to explicate some theoretical system with a carefully curated collection of anecdotes chosen to support a pre-formulated thesis.

The value of this book is not constrained to the topic of sexual abuse, about which I knew almost nothing. It is of great value to anyone looking to deepen his understanding of American society over the past 50 years, or of this evening's news, or of today's Oprah. It also potentially invites introspection about the nature of one's own identity and its formation and revision.

[Regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written by my colleague Joe Davis, it was first recommended to me by my dissertation advisor, Charles Bosk. It is definitely an academic and extremely scholarly book. However, it may have a broader appeal for people who work in the helping professions, especially mental health professions. Joe provides a big picture approach to thinking about victimization. He carefully traces the historical evolution of therapeutic approaches to childhood sexual abuse, but more interesting than that he provides cultural insight about the social consequences of this history. Joe build's on Charles Taylor's insight about how people create and maintain their identities in modern society. For Joe, victim's are not just passive blobs, they are doing their modern thing. They are trying to make good a spoiled identity, to reinvent and cleanse themselves. This observation strikes me as essentially true and therapeutically valuable.

Maybe reinventing ourselves isn't such a shallow bad thing? Maybe there is something to be gained by taking a step back and bracketing this judgment. Of course, there is a danger that people will interpret this book to mean childhood sexual abuse is not traumatic just because it is "socially constructed" and "culturally mediated". Nothing could be further from the truth, Joe has a healthy respect for the power of culture. I think this is what I like most about his writing.

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rigorously researched, careful analysis of the historical origins, contemporary functioning, and larger implications of claims of child sexual abuse by adult survivors.

Unlike many studies of this topic, Davis does not set out to disprove or minimize the claims of survivors. To the contrary, his analysis offers important insight in how to conceptualize the moral and political salience of such claims without depicting them as ahistorical or unmediated. Though he does not claim an explicitly feminist orientation, he is clearly sympathetic to the feminist analysis of child sexual abuse throughout, another strength of the work.

This book is an excellent counterpoint to much of the contemporary work in queer studies on children's sexual experiences. That literature strives to efface the feminist analysis of child sexual abuse and replace it with a conceptualization of the harm of such abuse stemming primarily from feminist-inflected adult anxiety around childhood innocence and "stranger danger." In contrast, Davis' book, alongside the excellent "The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse" by Nancy Whittier and "Heroes of their Own Lives" by Linda Gordon, offers a historicized and repoliticized account of child sexual abuse and its personal and political after-effects. These texts are a necessary feminist counterpoint to the current theoretical trend of minimizing, effacing, or flatly denying claims of (sexual) victimization.

[Jennifer Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated the overall history of the field and the explanations of how our culture has changed over the years and why those changes occurred.