Whilst FSA is certainly an emerging object of human science knowledge that is receiving greater attention across the globe, denial and avoidance are not uncommon within both the medical and legal system. Across various institutions, female sexual violence is treated as rare, trivial and innocuous (Denov, 2001) to the extent that FSA perpetrators are often dismissed by officers of the law and, if they are formally acknowledged by the legal system, receive lighter sentences (if any at all) than their male counterparts. In addition, the social science and medical literature largely accounts for FSA through aetiologies inseparable from mental disturbances, substance abuse and/or histories of previous abuse (Higgs et al, 1992; Travers, 1999). The same aetiologies are not applied to male perpetrators who are regularly treated as ‘monsters’ that cannot control their innate sexual urges. This institutionalised level of avoidance, denial and invisibilisation filters into the public imagination such that they are reproduced and performed by individual subjects. The broader discursive exclusion of FSA manifested in comments such as “I’ve never ever heard of anyone talking about it” (P5) and
“you don’t hear about it in the news” (P7). Participants also spoke to the way that this invisibilisation and denial filtered into the daily practices and performances of those around them. For example, P2 described how his younger sister actively avoided his sexual relationship with his older sister:
P2: I got that image of me, like you know pleasuring her. On, on the bathroom floor. And I remember, my sister. My third sister coming back. I think she’d asked her to go and get bread or something. And I remember her wal- no, no, not walking in but you know when, she was walking through the kitchen door and we were in the bathroom. And I remember my third sister, the one I was always closest to saying that, announcing that, announcing that she’s there. Like, “yeah, I’m back, I’m here”, um, whatever, whatever. And my sister answering, “yeah, it’s okay”, whatever. And I, I remember wanting her to just come and you know, do whatever and she stood outside and said, “okay, I’m gonna go play”, or something like that. And then I felt betrayed by her. And...ya...
R: The other sister?
P2: The other sister that-
R: Like she may have known something was happening?
P2: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think like I’m actually even terrified to go there…to even think that she knows about something like that. She was aware that I’m in the bathroom. I don’t know if she knows or whatever...
P7’s comment that “I think she’d asked her to go and get bread” is an interesting insertion of the ‘normal’ into this ‘abnormal’ episode. This episode went on to define a whole category of personhood for P7:
My second sister had a kid. Um...so I’ve got a nephew. What would always be worrying me about is that did she do that to anyone else? And sometimes I try…to look for things and whatever but I think what if I find what I’m looking for and I don’t want to?
P2 thus ironically reproduces the very same practice of avoidance that he criticised his younger sister of. P7 also reproduced this avoidance and indicated that it was “best to forget it” and move on with his life. Reliance on this avoidance discourse echoes typical victimhood discourses that Weiss (2011) argues are so entrenched in the cultural narrative that victims inadvertently invoke them. This then, is not unique to FSA, but is also practiced by victims of male sexual abuse and is thus rather typical of sexual victimisation in general.
Participants also relayed how their perpetrators took advantage of the broader institutionalised practices of denial and avoidance. For example, P10 explained how her mother would anally rape her in shared family spaces (unlike in ‘dirty’ or hidden spaces reserved for constructions of male sexual abuse) and how most people knew that her mother was abusing her:
She didn’t give a damn who saw…she would do these things in the living room…You know. Where anybody could walk in and see what she was doing…and you know, people knew that I was being abused. And people knew there was something wrong with my mother. And nobody ever did anything about it so I was led to believe that this was normal behaviour. Or acceptable behaviour.
Similarly, P3 explained how her domestic worker warned P3 not to disclose to anyone, as she would not be believed in any case:
I was standing against, lying against my door…and she was like choking me and she was saying like, um, who are you gonna tell? What are you gonna do about it? Like that kind of like…you know? Like what are you going to do about it actually? Like literally choking me.
Again, these types of threats are also common in cases of male sexual abuse. However, male sexual violence victims are less likely than FSA victims to encounter avoidance responses. For example, P3 then went on to report that her perpetrator’s warning was realised when she attempted to tell her parents:
And I remember like, afterwards going into my parents’ bedroom, like knocking on the door, like can I come in? No, we sleeping… and then kind of just like okay well, they not gonna listen to me. Like many times I would bang that door down. But they would not come out.
P3’s reference to her parents’ bedroom signifies the Malthusian unit and the ways that avoidance and denial conceal the potential for FSA to disrupt the institutionally ‘acceptable’ and ‘healthy’ family. When P3’s behaviour began to change her parents “looked for every single reason to blame each other and blame the environment or whatever else”. Later when her psychologist informed her parents about the sexual abuse, P3’s parents continued to completely avoid broaching the issue with her:
I went to see my psychologist and I said to him, did you tell my mom? And he’s like, ya. And I’m like but she hasn’t said anything. She hasn’t even like said nothing. And then I got really angry. Because now you know, and you’re not saying anything to me about it.
In much the same way, P4 noted how his family explained away his gonorrhoea with “kid’s play” despite their knowledge that he “wouldn’t have caught…from someone who is my age”. Similarly, P8 indicated that he never fought off his sexually abusive girlfriend because he felt that “she would have turned the story around and said that I tried to do something to her instead” and that this version would have been more plausible.
The denial and avoidance practiced by participants’ various support structures resulted in the invisibilisation of participants’ victimisation and the implication that FSA is an impossible event. Given that this ‘impossibility’ was incongruent with participants’ narrated experiences, participants attempted to identify conditions that would make this FSA experience (globally) imaginable. One discursive strategy to this end was to rely on constructions of the category of childhood as a conceivable condition for FSA victimisation.