Telling It Like It Is: Understanding Adult Women’s Life-Long Disclosures of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This paper seeks to explore some of what we can learn from looking at adult
women’s stories of their experiences of disclosing childhood sexual abuse. The
research upon which the paper is based is an inter-disciplinary analysis of
“what happens” when women disclose child sexual abuse to others over the life
course. A socially aware understanding of the meaning of narrative and storytelling
has become of key importance in this research and begins to offer new
ways in which to develop research on sexually abusive experiences which
broadens the agenda of research on childhood sexual abuse. In particular
understanding narrative has offered new ways of accessing and understanding
issues relating to later life (that is, post-childhood) for women who have
experienced childhood sexual abuse.