The Anatomy of Silence

by Cyra Perry Dougherty

Before #MeToo, there was silence.

Let’s talk about that silence.

The Anatomy of Silence is a collection of voices speaking out loud - often for the first time - about what it means to stay silent, to be silenced, and to break the silence that surrounds sexual violence. About how we are all complicit in creating that silence. It offers an unflinching account of how a culture of shame perpetuates a culture of violence against our bodies—and reflects on what it would take to create a world in which that silence — once broken — stays broken.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Mental Health

226 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2019

Reviews

[Catherine Guthrie]

This book breaks the silence around sexual violence in profound ways. The collective trauma shared by its authors is a painful reflection of the oppressiveness of dominant power structures. But the fact that 26 writers not only found their voices but shouted their stories from the rooftop is a hopeful sign that times are changing. As Michelle Bowdler, one of the contributors, put it: "I yet again shout to the world #MeToo and look this time for change. Will we be seen? Will we be heard?" My sense is YES thanks, in no small part, to the voices captured in The Anatomy of Silence.

[Claire Wrobel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book started out mediocre and then got much better. That’s the risk of putting short stories together from many different authors—some are great writers and others are not. It’s hard to judge this book because each story is important and valid, but not every writer is a good writer. I sat on this book for over a month because I wasn’t moved but once I got about halfway through I felt moved by the stories.

[Book Shark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Anatomy of Silence by Cyra Perry Dougherty and Martin Burt

“The Anatomy of Silence” is a powerful collection of twenty-six stories about the meaning of silence and its complicity surrounding sexual violence. Social justice warrior and an ordained Interspiritual Minister, Cyra Perry Dougherty puts together a collection that examines one of the most difficult and sensitive topics, the complicity of silence involving sexual violence. This 168-page book includes twenty-six stories in various formats that examine the personal experiences of sexual violence.


Positives:
1. A well edited collection of personal experiences involving sexual violence.
2. A very powerful, painful and captivating read that captures the personal experiences of sexual violence.
3. The content warning makes it crystal clear what this book is all about. “This book is about making sure we break the silence once and for all. This is a book about changing the culture that perpetuates silence—because it’s the silence that allows the violence to thrive, and even to exist in the first place. Talking about it is the first step on the road towards healing.”
4. The collection asks the right questions. “Yet accepting that it did happen, accepting that it does happen, opens the door to another, potentially even more painful and divisive conversation: What do we do now? What does meaningful justice look like? How do healing and justice relate? And what work do we need to do at a cultural, social, and political level to ensure that we can heal, find justice, and make sure that sexual violence ends?”
5. Provocative. Throughout the book there will be statements made that resonate. “If the holding of pain is hard, the speaking of it to a world that does not want to hear is not a risk most of us will take.”
6. How privilege keeps us from addressing difficult issues.
7. The culture of silence, “No one wants more hurt. Silence feels like protection until we’re strong enough to speak, until we can no longer stay silent.”
8. Shares different experiences on how to deal with sexual violence. “For me, the firm and polite confrontation has proven to be one way of preventing escalating forms of sexual violence.”
9. The impact of being silenced. “Being silenced teaches the kind of silence that shuts down, closes off, and excludes; it is cold and harsh and full of fear; it tells us not to open our mouths and not to cry out for help. Many of us have learnt from being silenced to swallow our words and silence ourselves as we hyper-vigilantly scan the other sitting across from us, at home, or work or in a café.”
10. Toxic masculinity. “Toxic masculinity is the glorification of guns and violence. Toxic masculinity is sexual assault.”
11. The lack of infrastructure in society to help heal. “It’s no wonder that women don’t report sexual harassment and assault more often than we do. There’s no infrastructure of healing in a punitive system designed to keep a man from reconnecting to himself and to other human beings. There’s no healing for female victims sitting in rooms of tough guys with guns. What good was it for this sick man to sit in a prison cell for three months? What good was it for me to speak out in a society that is not built to hold my voice or the voices of other women? This is why we stay silent.”
12. The importance of addressing trauma. “The research is clear: not addressing trauma increases the likelihood that violence will be passed on to the next generation. The intervention needed is simple: it’s to ask. Not asking, therefore, becomes a dereliction and a malpractice of sorts.”
13. My favorite analogy about the pain of silence. “SILENCING PAIN IS LIKE putting a broken glass back together: the glass may be intact, but it will never function again as it should. The integrity of the thing it was is lost. One cannot trust it to hold what it could hold before. It won’t even look the same. Webs of cracks will forever deface its form no matter how well it is put back together. Silence is the glue. And after a while, it will begin to dry up, chip off, and loosen. Its ability to hold the brokenness together will eventually give way. Things will not fall apart all at once. First, the cracks, then the holes, then a piece here, a slab there. Slowly, surely, and with time, things will fall apart.”
14. Interesting perspective. “Silence is violence. The violent act of denying my story, pretending it did not happen, and never speaking of it again was more violent to me than any physical blows could be.”
15. Child abuse examined. “Now as an adult, I understand that we are the ones who want to silence children for the experiences and abuse they endure. Even when they are sharing their pain with us, we don’t seem to be able to hear it fully and enter into a conversation with them.”
16. The importance of listening. “Listening is how a voice is heard, held, and honored. Listening can bring truth to life. Listening invites the possibility of healing.”
17. Injustice illustrated. “What happened in Detroit was no anomaly; human rights groups identified cities that ignored rape evidence over decades—Dallas, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Memphis, Las Vegas, Houston, Milwaukee, New York City, and dozens more. Estimates of close to half a million evidence kits that held DNA of violent criminals simply had never been tested. They were disregarded, shelved, and left behind.”
18. Sexual violence in the religious community. “When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead.” “Communities are only truly safe when the safety of people is placed above the reputation of the group’s leadership and image.”
19. Sexual abuse in the military. “The military is not institutionally or culturally equipped to deal with the pains that the victims of sex abuse and harassment experience. The documentary entitled The Invisible War makes this painfully clear.”
20. Sexual violence in the workplace. “My biggest worry was backlash from coworkers. If they found out, especially if the OBC (Old Boys’ Club) knew, I would be ostracized—branded as an overly-sensitive trouble-maker.”
21. Dealing with rape. “My experience with the police turned out to be a second assault. As Doe experienced, my rapist had taken away my worth, my energy, my safety, and my voice. The campus community and the police had taken away my privacy.”
22. Examining self-male entitlement. “In moments, we found our common bond: verbally dissecting women’s bodies devoid of their personhood. While I congratulated myself on not joining in, I nonetheless opted for silence rather than confrontation for fear of being exiled from the inner circle of male entitlement.”
23. Healing. “And it was only by going into the silence, listening, and slowly naming what I was experiencing, that I healed.” “To recover, we need to be able to put our experiences into language that communicates what has happened, and we need to be heard—by ourselves and by others.”
24. Bios of the contributors.

Negatives:
1. There is a wide spectrum in the quality of the stories.
2. Personally, I have difficulty in comprehending poems (it is clearly a me problem).
3. Badly needed a couple of essays on the science of complicity. Why do we remain silent in the face of sexual violence? The essays do a great job of capturing the essence of the personal experiences but what does science say? Some essays provide stats and make mention of science but I wanted dedicated chapters or appendices of it.
4. Lacks visual supplementary material like charts and graphs. One again, this is a corollary to the previous point. I would have liked to see charts depicting sexual violence and its causes.
5. Never really addresses the why behind sexual violence and what we can do as a society to properly address it.
6. Such an important topic, I honestly wanted more.
7. I wanted so badly to have a bibliography to pursue reading other recommended books. Oh well, I’ll do my own research or go through the Bios.

In summary, this was a very difficult yet captivating book to read. The importance of addressing sexual violence cannot be overstated. It needs to be talked about more for the sake of preventing all its forms, remove the complicity behind the silence and how as a society we can help healing. This collection does a great job of capturing the personal experiences involving sexual violence and how our culture of silence impacts lives. My main negative is the lack of supplementary material involving the science behind the complicity of silence. This is a five star topic in importance and as such I wanted to see it addressed from the science perspective as well. That said, I recommend you read this book, it’s heartbreaking that so many people have to suffer sexual violence and how we are all complicit in various degrees with its silence.

Further recommendations: “The Courage Coach: A Practical, Friendly Guide on How to Heal From Abuse and Cults: Hidden in Plain Sight”, “Real Girls Have Real Problems” by Khalisa Rae, “Complicit” by Reah Bravo, “The Feminist Handbook” by Joanne L. Bagshaw and Soraya Chemaly, and “Bad Feminist: Essays” by Roxane Gay.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful

Definitely not a beach read, but this is a powerful book about the harm staying silent in the face of sexual violence causes to the survivors (and future victims) and the difficulties of speaking up.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories/ essays on this topic are so important. Love that they included men in reflecting how they've contributed to silence of sexual violence in the past

[Scott Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a week goes past without some sort of injustice hitting social media. It might not make the news, but it does the rounds in certain circles. Whispered words were the way women protected themselves from dangerous situations. Everyone knew about Harvey Weinstein before everyone knew about him because gossip was a weapon of defence.

But now the world is more connected, and in some ways less beholden to laws which prevent journalists potentially printing something defamatory. The allegations towards R. Kelly and Bryan Singer began with similar whispers and are now unavoidable, the news free to report on what other people are saying online.

The Anatomy of Silence is about sexual violence, but it’s also about ‘all the shit that gets in the way of talking about sexual violence’. These twenty six stories go on an arc from the personal to the political (if the two can be separated), the horror changing as we go from within to without.

What could make for an almost impossible read is therefore empowering. By the very nature of these words being read, they are serving their purpose of breaking a long-observed silence.

That silence crops up everywhere in discourse surrounding sexual violence, from how it is dealt with in court to anonymous accounts on the internet asking why someone never reported their assault. The book is not a series of diary entries, but rather the dilemmas each person faced when confronted with the reality of something they likely thought they would have handled far differently.

Cyra Perry Dougherty writes of how her partner ‘violated’ a girl whose mother calls her, furious, confused, desperate. After realising Dougherty understood his violence too, the mother changes, calms, and a terrifying peace comes over them. She asks Dougherty if she is okay, and like that, a solidarity among those who have experience with gendered abuse is made. Not only does breaking the silence lead to a grim understanding, but their story is passed on to the reader who can only carry it with them as these two women have.

That kind of sharing is all through the book, but in different shapes. Monique Harris’s Things Fall Apart tells a story that fell on deaf ears when she needed someone to listen. It's not so much that she wasn’t believed or that she didn’t speak, but that nothing came of her words. The horror is multi-faceted; first the abuse happens, but then there's the lack of acknowledgement from those who are meant to be unconditionally supportive. Maybe writing that entry was therapeutic, but in this scenario, how can there be anything other than a sense of duty on the reader's part to listen when others let her down?

Elsewhere, there are experiences with systems of care which are ill-equipped for what they purport to do, institutional failures in the process of justice, and how communities aren’t prepared to look inward at their own transgressions.

Frederick Marx’s entry on men and their inability to feel their own feelings stands in stark contrast to much of the rest of the book. Where the silence is often seen among those who have been directly involved in the violence, here is the silence among perpetrators generally. It critiques hyper-masculine language, brought into public discourse recently with a ridiculous Gillette advert, and how places like the military only perpetuate the cycle of hurt.

Herein lies The Anatomy of Silence’s biggest hurdle. These stories are loaded with empathy, whispers turned to roars, ready to be told. Marx’s essay shows how difficult it is to make those who need to hear them the most listen. These are brave words, with no one - not even the authors - free from being made to reflect on their own part in what is keeping silence in place. These twenty six essays encapsulate all forms of abuse from all different places, in which everyone has a part to play.

There is a ripple effect to something that is said. Certainly, it can't be unsaid. This book, which is a look at silence, is ironically and defiantly loud. There is nothing here that ties The Anatomy of Silence to a trend, no use of slogans and marketing to turn liberation into something chic. Straight-faced, it looks people in the eye and asks them to keep talking. More, it asks how each individual is involved in either helping or hindering that talking. This purposeful collection of writing is exposing what is letting us down.

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Anatomy of Silence, edited by Cyra Perry Dougherty, is a powerful testament that should be read whether or not you already think you understand the problems around sexual violence

These stories are each moving in their own way. Like any such collection, some will strike closer to home than others, but they all will elicit some kind of strong sentiment in you. They appeal to the reader on multiple levels, sometimes within the same piece, sometimes not. There are accounts that highlight the helpless feeling and the feeling of isolation and abandonment. There are also accounts that use that as a springboard into a more clinical expression, but still personal in nature.

The key theme running through them, for other survivors of sexual violence, is that you are not alone and that you do indeed matter. For those of us fortunate enough to have not experienced this type of violence, every account offers insight into what we can and should do if we know someone who is or has experienced it. And for medical professionals, to quote from one of the stories; "The intervention needed is simple: it's to ask. Not asking, therefore, becomes a dereliction and a malpractice of sorts."

I stated in the opening I think everyone should read this regardless of whether the topic is old or new to you. I say this because, if it is new, you need to understand the personal aspect of what is happening and how it is often implicitly sanctioned by various power structures. If the topic is not new to you, I am a firm believer that we periodically need to remind ourselves why we beat our heads against the brick wall and rejoice, ever so briefly, when we cause the smallest of cracks. Whatever emotions this generates for you, anger, sadness, disgust, or any other, needs to be revisited so we can remain vigilant and tireless. If these people can be strong enough to share these stories, we owe them not only a listen but any support and action we can offer to minimizing future violence.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very hard to read, as someone who has been a victim myself, but the stories are important to be shared.

[Sabrine Cutting · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were many relatable stories, which made it even harder to process and read, but this was necessary to start healing.

[Lis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A powerful collection of 26 articles, essays and poems by survivors of sexual violence and their allies about what it means to be silent, to stay silent and to be complicit in silencing others. Edited by American spiritualist and business coach Cyra Perry Dougherty – an extract from whose essay you can read in my original post about this anthology – this is an often harrowing and difficult read but, by showing the connections and the healing that come when silence is broken, an empowering and often uplifting one for all that.

I’ll commend two essays to you in particular: “Dissecting My Silence” by Terrence “Red” Crowley, in which the author reckons with how his silence helped to perpetuate the status quo; and “Courage Calls To Courage” by Emily Porth, which opens with the author receiving an email from an old friend in the aftermath of the Brock Turner case and closes with a healing of sorts.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read these essays, stories, chapters, poems I recognized them. These are tales that talk about the silence and the multitude of reasons for the silence. Each one is powerful in a different way. Each one sticks with you in a different way. Ideally, one should not read them one right after the other, but should allow recovery time between them. And, some may not be recovered from at all.