Statistics reveal
that two of three Canadian women have experienced sexual violence[1].
Yet despite the social context operant in sexual violence, medically
labelled “psychiatric problems” – for example,
substance use, self-harm and anger - are regularly defined as pathological
in women survivors of sexual violence[2]. This essay identified
how contemporary psychiatric conceptualizations of female survivors
of sexual violence reproduce historic constructs of the hysterical
female body: a biomedical phenomenon, emblematic of “the traditionally
negative characteristics considered to be feminine” - for
example, “duplicity, theatricality, suggestibility, instability,
weakness, passivity, excessive emotionality”[3]. This work
used an anti-racist, anti-oppression framework to identify feminist
conceptualizations of sexual violence as strategic resistance to
psychiatry – itself a sexist institution.
Acts of feminist and survivor-based
resistance to psychiatry include:
• Maintaining an understanding of sexual violence that does
“not locate the determinants of violence against women [with]in
women’s lives or in the ways [that] they [choose to] cope”[4]
• Maintaining a focus on “the socio-political underpinnings
of violence vis-à-vis service delivery” for survivors[5]
• Maintaining spaces for survivors’ voices and expertise
• Anti-rape workers’ capacity to “assert and reinforce
boundaries in ways that do not exploit power differences between
clients and staff”[6]
• Holding society accountable for the problem of sexual violence,
as opposed to locating this problem in individual sexual offenders,
survivors, and medicalized “symptomology”
[1] METRAC Sexual Assault
Fact Sheet. http://www.metrac.org/programs/info/prevent/ass_fact.htm
[2] Canadian Mental Health Association: Violence and Trauma - Impact
of traumatic events upon women's mental health. http://www.ontario.cmha.ca/women.asp?cID=6153
[3] Bankey, R. “La Donna é Mobile: Constructing the
Irrational Woman”. Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 8, No.
1. 2001, 40.
[4] Bonisteel, M. and Linda Green. “Implications of the Shrinking
Space for Feminist Anti-violence Advocacy”. Presented at the
2005 Canadian Social Welfare Policy Conference, Forging Social Futures,Fredericton,
New Brunswick, Canada, 25
[5] Ibid, 33
[6] Ibid, 40 |