Danny Taggart and Jo Stubley: Q and A on their new Open Access volume

The Open Access Team spoke to both Dr Danny Taggart, Reader in the School of Health and Social Care, and Dr Jo Stubley, Consultant Psychotherapist and Clinical Lead of the Tavistock Trauma Service, about their new volume, Talking about Non-Recent Child Sexual Abuse: Survivor, Clinician and Researcher Perspectives (Routledge). 

As well as in hardcover and paperback, it’s available as an Open Access (OA) digital edition, which was supported by the University’s OA fund and can be downloaded free of charge here.

Congratulations both! How does it feel to see your book in print and freely available online?

Thank you, it has been a labour of love for us both for several years so it is a source of satisfaction to see it in print finally. Writing about child sexual abuse raises complex feelings for us as authors and editors. On the one hand we feel proud to be bringing this collection into print as it draws attention to an important social issue that for too long has been cast into society’s shadows through shame, denial and cover up. However, it is also a painful topic and one that has destroyed many lives and so any feelings of joy are very much tempered by this.

The final thing we want to acknowledge is that with an open access publication supported by the University of Essex we can reach a much wider and more diverse audience than usual. One of our hoped for groups of readers are survivors of child sexual abuse themselves and several authors in the book are also survivors. We hope that free access can mean that survivors can engage with the work of others on this topic and that this can help them to feel less alone in their experiences, a key problem in this area.

What are the book’s origins? When did it begin as a project and what brought you together to work on it?

We started working together in 2019 when Danny was at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and Jo was offering him clinical supervision as part of his role there. Our discussions often turned to the importance of IICSA as a transitional justice process for making talking about this most taboo of topics possible and in enabling survivors to be seen as part of the solution. We also talked about the political context of child sexual abuse and how the institutional failings investigated by IICSA were mirrored in our own helping professions which have often struggled to support practitioners to work with survivors safely and with compassionate care.

All this led us to think we could build on IICSA’s work and apply some of its learning to our own helping professions. One outcome of this was to co-found the NRCSA Network for the Promotion of Change. The network is a small group of researchers, clinicians and survivors (some who hold a number of these identities) who share our ethos. 

How did you go about recruiting your contributors?

Well that was a great pleasure as we invited our colleagues from the Network who had already co-produced a conference on this topic the year before. We also asked other colleagues whose voices we felt needed to be heard. It was such a pleasure to bring survivors, clinicians and researchers together in one volume as often they are separate areas of scholarship. The other great pleasure was the diversity of voices we were able to bring in, you have a real pioneer in Valerie Sinason, someone who has been writing about this subject for many decades before it had any social recognition alongside Kiki Hassen, an emerging important voice at the beginning of what we know will be an important career in the field.

Each of the authors brings something unique and important but what is shared across them is a commitment to talking about child sexual abuse to create new ways of supporting survivors and increase awareness of our collective responsibility to address these types of human rights violations.

The final key contributor was the artist Jenissa Paharia who allowed us to use her beautiful image of Pandora’s Box on the front cover. We had worked with Jenissa before and we know that we needed to offer some artistic beauty as an antidote to the subject matter so were over the moon when she was kind enough to let us use the image. It perfectly captures what the book is aiming for in not shying away from talking about a difficult topic but showing that hope is always there, waiting to be found.

You are tackling an extraordinarily sensitive and haunting subject, a source of life-long pain for so many. How do you hope this work will help them?

The existence of the book itself shows that what has been an unspeakable subject can be named and discussed in different ways. This in itself is an important start. We also hope that it can increase practitioner confidence and skill in managing disclosures with survivors.

We also hope to raise awareness that survivors have a lot to offer in this space and that creative collaboration with professionals can produce new forms of expression. Individual chapters also address important areas such as the experiences of people from ethnic minorities and trans people, as well as focusing in on areas of practice such as working with shame, supervision and the importance of language.

What issues do you discuss in your own chapters?

Danny was fortunate in being able to contribute two chapters alongside the introduction with Jo. In my first chapter I look at what the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt can teach us about how survivor testimony can be harnessed to challenge institutional practices as an alternative to conventional therapeutic approaches. I was honoured to co-author the second chapter with Professor Katie Wright from La Trobe University, Melbourne. Katie and I wrote about how shame can get in the way of talking about child sexual abuse, how it can infect those working in the area as well as survivors but that developing forms of connection can reduce the isolating impacts of shame.

Jo’s chapter focuses on the organizational and institutional ways in which the knowledge and the reality of child sexual abuse is denied, disavowed or dissociated from. This perpetuates the silence, shame and stigma that survivors may have encountered and also impacts on the support they may receive.

Had you planned to publish Open Access from the very beginning? How did you find the publishing process and do you have any OA advice for colleagues?

We were very fortunate to have the offer of an OA book at a key point in the book’s development. It was too good an opportunity to pass up and we were delighted and grateful when the University agreed to support us. We know how hard it is for busy clinicians to read journal articles and that the emergence of social media content in the field risks oversimplifying a complex area, and so being able to provide people with an in depth resource containing a range of expertise has been really wonderful.

Given that the book is Open Access and free to share, how do you plan to make best use of that and who do you most hope to reach?

We have a launch event in London with some academic colleagues later in the year where we hope to share it more widely. The training we do often is international in scope and we are planning on using the book as a learning resource to connect with clinicians working across a range of sectors in multiple countries.

The Open Access digital edition of Talking about Non-Recent Child Sexual Abuse: Survivor, Clinician and Researcher Perspectives is free to download now.    

Edited collections like this are, unfortunately, no longer eligible for support from the University’s Open Access fund. However, if you would like to request financial support for a monograph or chapter that you would like to publish Open Access, please contact the University’s OA team using this form.