Thank you so much Danielle, for your time, insight, expertise, and generosity in today’s episode. We join you in your commitment to increase knowledge about rape and sexual violation and provide language so people can name sexual violation for what it is.

Here is the link to Danielle’s website which has a link to her book, “Speaking About Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations.”

https://www.danielletumminiohansen.com/

Listed below are the quotes from Danielle’s book which were read and discussed in this episode:

"Those who listen to testimonies of those who experience sexual violations may be unaware that the linguistic choices they make may cause the person who shared so vulnerably to feel misrepresented or discredited, and thus cause a listener to inflict unintentional linguistic harm"

"...from recognizing that most human beings - even including those who perpetuate harm - are nuanced and complicated. A person can charm, coach your daughter's basketball team, be married and professionally successful, publicly advocate for women, and still pin down a girl on a bed against her will, cover her mouth, and attempt to have sex with her. This is possible, though many believe it is not."

" ... this was a classic "he-said-she-said" case of sexual harm. It would not go to trial. It would not receive a conviction, rendering any kind of public accusation an emotional and expensive experiment in futility. Moreover, our justice system operates in such a way that it punishes an individual for what is considered to be an individually perpetrated crime against another individual. However, if what I propose in this book is true - that sexual harm is a collective and not just an individual problem - then it follows that our individual system of retributive punishment requires re-examination, because meaningful accountability is needed on the part of both the person who perpetrated the harm and the wider society that enabled it"

: "...the definitional gaps that exist in matters of sexual harm will continue to function as forms of linguistic violence done to the individual by the collective. This linguistic violation becomes just one more component of the rape, one more way in which the person's body agency, and desire get disregarded, resulting in a toxic, symbiotic relationship between individuals and the collective in regard to the sexual harm done."

"One of the differences between a violating and non violating sexual encounter, then, is that the victimized party is denied co-authorship, so that the person who causes the violation alone writes the key plot points, overexerting narrative agency in a way that attempts to write the victimized person's story and have a lasting impact on that person's self. What separates those who inflict sexual harm from those who are on the receiving end of it, then, is that the latter group did not consent - irrespective of what they said or did not say during the encounter - to becoming the selves that the former tried to narrate them into being.”

Thank you so much Danielle, for your time, insight, expertise, and generosity in today’s episode. We join you in your commitment to increase knowledge about rape and sexual violation and provide language so people can name sexual violation for what it is.

This is the link to Danielle’s website which has a link to her book, “Speaking About Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations.”

https://www.danielletumminiohansen.com/

Listed below are the quotes from Danielle’s book which were read and discussed in this episode:

"What does it take to keep a person from naming her own sexual violation for what it is?"

"I recall a session with my own therapist where I was going to tell her about what had happened to me, but when it came time for me to actually explain, I found that I didn't have words to do it. I verbally froze, unable to speak, unable to say words like "rape" or "sexual assault" or even to offer a description of what had occurred. What I could do, though, was turn to music, the vocabulary of my childhood. I took out a compact disc player and turned on Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei, a devastating choral composition that begins as quietly as it is possible for singers to perform - pianissimo - and then escalates in tone and tension into a kind of collective vocal suffering. And what a singer seems to communicate in the performance of it is the same thing I was feeling: a profound sense of aloneness, of hopelessness, of fear. It said what I needed to say better than any narrative could have. My therapist seemed to understand, and after that, I found that I was able to talk about my experiences a little more freely."

"If you don't see yourself included in the language, then what is there to say? Because those who survived harm live within linguistic discourses, they may also self-gaslight, becoming unable to categorize harm that they might have named had they been exposed to different epistemic constructions of it, by which I mean that they might have thought differently about their own experiences if they had been exposed to different ways of constructing the knowledge related to it."

"Victimized individuals may, therefore, first imagine themselves as co-writers or, at least, ghost writers who had at least some agency or subjectivity in the encounter to maintain a sense of control or a sense of protection, or because they genuinely believe that's the most accurate representation of the event. Put more colloquially, they are prone to blame themselves. And while psychologists often label this as denial, I'm not sure it's always as simple as that - sometimes people are wrestling with the significance of events using competing ways of knowing (or epistemologies), which resolves into cognitive dissonance and the feeling that one is assembling a puzzle, the but the events that make up the pieces do not fit together to create a coherent picture. That's not denial. That's turmoil."

We are so grateful to "Esther" for taking the time and energy to raise their voice and help us continue to learn what it means to be everyday advocates. To read a fuller version of "Esther's" story, check out their blog at www.overturningtables.co.uk

You can also find @overturning_tables on Instagram

The email from the Head of Safeguarding referenced in the conversation can be found here: https://overturningtables.co.uk/email#abdbdd56-2cb9-481f-afd3-8b362b38d09d

Esther has also recommends a couple of resources:

https://survivorsgateway.london/

https://safespacesenglandandwales.org.uk/

And if you'd like to support an organization that has helped "Esther" and many others, consider Rape Crisis England and Wales https://www.justgiving.com/page/rape-crisis