Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar Julia B. Haager Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse. By Nick Basannavar. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xi + 327 pp. Cloth $119.99, paper 119.99, e-book $89.00. Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965 introduces the concept of "trailing abuse" to describe the hints of child sexual abuse in media [End Page 519] representations and Basannavar's own process of tracking them. Basannavar shows that trails of child sexual abuse operate like the oft-told fairytale of Hansel and Gretel leaving a breadcrumb trail into the forest—language combines with the audiences' cultural capital, leaving an incomplete, obfuscated, and difficult path to follow. Child sexual abuse, therefore, was not brought from silence to visibility with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Representational trails emerged earlier in the media, shrouded in descriptive imagery, euphemism, metaphor, and metonym. This book is an impressive and timely discussion of continuity and change in the way language has worked to both reveal and conceal child sexual abuse in modern Britain. The book begins by breaking down the intellectual "Landscapes" (Part I) and key psychological developments that led to twentieth-century understandings of childhood, sexual violence, age-of-consent laws, and ultimately child sexual abuse. Basannavar's discussion spans from intergenerational relationships in Greece and Rome through England's first rape laws in 1285 to well-known theories of human sexuality from Freud and Krafft-Ebing. Throughout, he explains that "definitional diversity" has always made it difficult to identify both childhood and sexual abuse (10–11, 28–30, 38–40). From there, the book moves into four case studies that reveal how "definitional diversity" revealed and concealed child sexual abuse after 1965: the Moors murder trial of 1966, the establishment of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in 1974, the eruption of the Cleveland scandal in 1987, and the allegations against the entertainer Jimmy Savile in 2012. "Moorland," the book's second part, examines media coverage of a murder trial involving five children (ages ten to seventeen), four of whom were sexually abused by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Trial transcripts and newspaper coverage deployed language about sadism and Satanism, gendered discussions of Hindley's role, gothic tropes, and fictional crime stories to speak indirectly about the unspeakable act of child sexual abuse (11–12; 88–89). Basannavar's account of the PIE in Part III is nuanced and attentive to second-wave feminists' decrying of domestic and child sexual abuse in the 1970s. He does not deny the importance of feminists in drawing attention to these topics. Instead, he argues that the PIE's efforts to exploit the era's push for liberal sexual rights and abolish age-of-consent laws contributed to widespread usage of the term "pedophile" and its ongoing association with homosexuality (11; 165–67; 172–73). The PIE ushered in an era of more frank terminology about child sexual abuse in the media but did not necessarily abolish earlier linguistic patterns that obfuscated it. [End Page 520] In the Cleveland episode (Part IV), doctors and social workers removed 121 children from their families because of sexual abuse. In response, the media deployed earlier tropes like Satanism and ritualism and lobbed gendered critiques of female social workers. Unlike earlier, the media recognized that male family members were more likely to commit abuse against young girls, a clear shift away from the "stranger danger" trope of unknown adult males against young boys from the 1960s (173; 241–42). The relationship between child welfare, the family, and the state was central to these debates, a theme the book carries over into the Savile case in 2012 (Part V) when the media expressed "a sense of collective failure" to identify decades-long abuse by a public figure (12). With Savile's case, "representational mythologies, codes and tropes both endure and transmute in the cultural conscience" even though the media is more willing to openly discuss child sexual abuse (254–55). It is the continuity of these representational trails that helps to explain why sexual violence against children is often described...