[speaker001:] which is trying to accumulate a record of how the English language is used in everyday context, like lectures, like in broadcasts, like in people's homes and so forth. Now I must ask you, I hope you don't mind me recording this thing. Does anybody not, does anybody object to me recording the lecture? Informed Consent and all that kind of thing. Erm now it says it says about Informed Consent forms. Now because there are too many of you to fit on the form, is it okay if like one person signs it on behalf of a group an and that's okay cos they want informed con who who who wan who wants to sign a form and be part of the British National Corpus? Okay go on, let's let's give it to yeah. Mhm, right, now that's that's that bit over with. It's interesting actually that it says on all the outsides of all the tapes Aston Business School so I'd just like to say for the benefit of the tape recorder and the British National Corpus, this is where the Business School ends and this is where Psychology takes over. We are a University within a University. Now, on the handout is says child sex abuse and that's what we g we're going to be dealing with today. Erm just to introduce the subject. First of all I suspect most of you are familiar with Freud and the infantile seduction theory and the way in which, pardon?
[Brown:] Nev never heard of it, alright. Well, very briefly, the ideas was Freud in his early practice was getting stories from his patients that they had somehow been sexually interfered with or abused or something of the kind when they were very young, often by an older male friend of the family, a relative, or even their father and initially Freud thought these reminiscences were literally true. Subsequently he changed his mind, possibly in relation to pressure from outside, possibly in an attempt to make psychoanalysis more acceptable, possibly because he couldn't come to terms with the fact himself and he then came round to the point of view that these were fantasised seductions as he called them. He called them seductions, interestingly enough, rather than child sex abuse, as we would perhaps now call it. So erm seduction's one of these words that implies more consensual type activity, implies that it's sort of y'know kind of candle light and soft music and firelight and all that kind of thing but which it probably wasn't in most cases. Now erm I suppose more recently coming up the present, coming away from nineteenth century Vienna into erm I suppose really I suppose the nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties, people became much more interested in the issue of child sex abuse again and this wasn't really because of any great developments in clinical psychology or psychiatry. It the impetus came I think largely from feminism and it was perhaps a way of of y'know kind of erm because there was a great deal of interest, particularly in the seventies, in cataloguing and understanding the various ways in which women were oppressed and this is one of the things came to light and often through things like consciousness raising groups. It came to light that er a great many of the members, a great many of the people who talked about their early experiences reported some sort of abusive experience, either y'know er quite a short one that went on over many many years you know that er if it was some relative or friend of the family they were likely to have been abused for quite a long time in some cases. So that's mainly where the impetus came from and this gradually fed through into more academic forms of research, virtually fed through into popular consciousness so that erm you end up with, particularly in the late eighties early nineties, erm a great deal of interest in the media, a great deal of interest among professionals in s child sex abuse and child abuse generally. Maybe erm maybe our culture has particular metaphors, particular ways of understanding ways of human distress and it seems that very often when people have a rather non-specific distress these days, I mean it's very common to find that erm counsellors, professionals, will be looking in into people's backgrounds, looking into people's backgrounds for evidence of child sex abuse. People didn't use to do that twenty thirty forty years ago so erm child sex abuse is very much on the agenda, both of professionals and also on the agenda of people suffering from sort of distress for which they are receiving professional help because um that's one of the things which um I think more nowadays than before you find people encouraged to look for. Going back, we're jumping back and forth in history, this is all sort of fairly mickey mouse history really, it's just erm isolated observations and bits of information. Going back in history, however, gives us some idea of the often contentious and problematic relationships between childhood and sexuality. If you go back erm or let's go back to the second half of the seventeenth century, that's always a good time to go to erm when erm well it was just after the English revolution, just after the English civil war, the Charles the First had been executed. Around about a bit later they er Charles the Second was er came down out of his oak tree and climbed on to the throne and round about that time you found the childhood of erm childhood of Robert Walpole who was a famous politician in well first half of the eighteenth century. It was said that um when he was a baby his nurse used to masturbate him in the cradle t to calm him to stop him crying and er apparently this was at that time, so it was believed, quite a common way of of keeping infants quiet. Erm you sort of ah if you were in charge of infu infants you you played with their genitals. In the nineteenth century this all changed because opiates became much more widely and cheaply available so er babies were dosed with paregoric to stop them crying erm er and subsequently in the twentieth century that stopped and we do other things now. But um also in the eighteen century, the eighteenth century is quite interesting because of the way in which sexuality was conceptualised then. In the eighteenth century in France you have people writing like the Marquis de Sade er in this country people like John Wit Wilmotold of Rochester. Erm we have a we have erm a vision of sexuality which is often quite frankly abusive. Erm, it's quite frankly about abusing women and it's often the case that in the eighteenth century one's sexuality was considered to begin much earlier than we do now. That is, people writing in the eighteenth century that th you know um it was appropriate for kids to be introduced to sex when they were around y'know sort of seven or eight or something in some cases. Um, usually these kinds of writings were written by y'know kind of upper class white heterosexual men erm so er you can see where that kind of prospective was coming from, but er nevertheless these kinds of views were being expressed around about that time. That's why, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, quite a fundamental shift in how we conceptualise masculinity and femininity seemed to take place. At the beginning of the nineteenth century you get people like Jane Austen writing, writing about heroines with minds of their own, women who can actually think and talk and do all sorts of things that very often in literature women hadn't been conceptualised as doing before. Again, if you go back before about eighteen hundred, if you look at er if you look at art, you find that painters paint things entitled The Rape of Europa, The Rape of, The Rape of whoever it is and if you look at these pictures it's just people lounging around with not very many clothes on. There's no sense in that that er it's a crime of violence going on. It's really I suppose only in the y'know nineteenth century that the perspective starts to shift, the perspective starts to shift towards understanding rape as a crime of violence. So that erm perhaps puts erm some of sexuality in a little bit of a historical context erm and um I suppose coming into the nineteenth century though, nineteenth century, particularly the second half of the nineteenth century, in large cities it was notorious for child prostitution for um a whole rate of exploitative sexual practices that underlay Victorian respectability so erm all these um peculiar kinds of things seemed to be going on. So let's see. Erm, just to erm veer back on to the on to the handout for the moment. Erm on the first bit of the handout I've stuck a couple of definitions of child sex abuse on, just to um give you a little bit of context an and er give you some idea of the sorts of things that people have the sorts of ways in which people are defining this phenomenon nowadays. Now um I suppose in that context um one of the things that makes this perhaps rather difficult to understand is the way in which y'know kind of when you look at children playing, when you talk to children, they'll often express a good deal of curiosity about sexuality um both to each-other and to to adults. Er they'll ask questions about sex, they'll ask questions about parts of the body er sometimes kids aren't exactly au fait with the social niceties and taboos so they'll say totally inappropriate things in front of in front of elderly relatives who are deeply shocked and um all that kind of thing.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Um nevertheless er there's a fundamental distinction made by most authors that to include children, to include apparently emotionally immature people, in sexual relationships as you would with adults is is fundamentally abusive. Erm, that is kids may express curiosity, kids may even be doing things that imply they're getting some sort of pleasure out of their bodies y'know they may be, as we used to call it when I was a child, playing with themselves, um they may be erm doing various things that er that give them some sort of bodily pleasure. Nevertheless, there's a fundamental distinction made by most authors that um y'know kind of up to a certain age involving kids in sexual relations with adults is abusive because of the discrepancy in power, because of the discrepancy in physical size, because of a whole range of social discrepancies. That is um kids are generally speaking encouraged to obey adults. Kids are generally speaking um encouraged not to refuse what adults are doing to them. Er this can work er to everybody's advantage when you're talking about medical procedures, when you're talking about giving people injections a encouraging people to eat their greens and er take cod liver oil and all these things which adults believe are are quite good and useful things. So it's very very easy in that context for adults to exploit children's compliance and er it's easy for kids to be able to not refuse adults' advances and I suppose that's why there's this business about erm y'know it's it's not possible for kids to give informed consent to sex. That's why er many authors insist on that aspect of child sex abuse, that erm apparent consent or even y'know when it seems that the child is expressing some curiosity about that these activities, nevertheless it's abusive. That's the um general er consensus in most of the things I've read in trying to find out stuff for this lecture. Erm another thing comes in. How do we conceptualise children's sensual activity? There are some people erm it was Liz Hall and Siobahn Lloyd who wrote a book called Surviving Child Sex Abuse and er they reckon that the construct of sexuality is something that's invented by adults. It's not something that kids are really privy to. If kids do things with their body that give them physical pleasure, that's more sensuality rather than sexuality. Sexuality is something that adults do. If you say, as sometimes judges in Court cases do, sometimes child abusers do, oh she led me on, she was eager and willing, oh she erm, well judges don't actually say it in the first person, do they, usually? Not in public anyway. Erm but er those those kinds of things mean that, according to Hall and Lloyd, adults are projecting their notions of sexuality on the children. Now, another thing that erm one should bear in mind I suppose in talking about child sex abuse, is the way a great many of terms are contentious. If somebody's been abused erm typically in the past they were referred to as victims. More recently, of course, there's been a lot of controversy about the term victim. Does it imply passivity, does it imply helplessness, so sometimes people talk about survivors. Now erm on the other hand, the experience of being abused may not give one a very strong sense of one's own survival. Er somebody said to me about her childhood experiences, well I didn't really survive them, I'm just here still because I didn't die. Y'know so she didn't necessarily have a strong sense of y'know coping and surviving and er using strategies which helped her get through it. She was just there because she hadn't er hadn't passed away. Erm so erm I suppose the business of victims as survivors is a conflict, a controversy, which you might see in reading about this topic, and some people don't use the term victims for that reason. Um how do we find out how on earth, how much, how much this kind of activity goes on? Well of course it's very difficult. It's difficult for various reasons. First of all because we're dealing with a socially taboo thing. Second of all because we're dealing with a topic which people may not want to talk about, may not erm er want to answer questions on to a market researcher, for obvious reasons. Erm for another reasons, which we shall get on to a bit later, there may be a great deal of confusion, er memories may not be clear or well formed, um people, according to some theories and ideas, people may be under-reporting because um y'know it helps them maintain their eq equilibrium a bit better. It's helps them cope with the experience if they if they if they don't define it as abusive. So, for all these reasons, and more, which I'm sure you can think of, it's very difficult to define exactly how much it goes on and er and what exactly er the abuse involves. Nevertheless, as I've detailed on the handout, there are some pieces of survey evidence available as to what the extent of various practices are, apparently. Again, according to self reports from people who've actually been abused in this way. For example there was a survey by West which was published in eighty five. There was um a survey in San Francisco by Russell which was published in 1983. There was some stuff by Baker and Duncan in eighty five and in a book by Olive Stephenson called Child Sex Abuse. Um she looked for um she looked at er a survey of two thousand odd adults that had been conducted in this country. That survey was quite methodologically sound in that the sampling procedure was er designed so as to make it as representative as possible of the U K population. Um and erm well anyway the frequencies and er various kind of frequencies of various kinds of activity are mentioned on the handout so you can er you can see that for yourself. It's not much point me just sort of reciting the percentages. Um now, okay, so there are some problems in getting a handle on exactly how much of these kinds of activities go on and whom they affect. There are also some problems in understanding the effects on people. Now um I've stuck in some data from the West study about um what sorts of feelings people reported themselves as having. Pity amusement seventy one percent, anger sixty nine percent etcetera etcetera.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Now um these percentages don't add up to a hundred. I mean individuals erm participating in this study could well indicate several responses. It's also the case that erm these, don't forget, are self-reports so what people were actually suffering um may be rather different possibly. It's also the case that, as I was saying earlier, people may be erm may be may be attributing. It's an ex exercise in their atr attribution y'know if you feel angry now and you attribute it to some abusive incident which you may remember from your childhood um that's er that's an accomplishment. It er it's difficult to tell y'know whether people are under attributing or over attributing. Now, some of the more radical theorists on child abuse would say that generally speaking people people under remember people under report people under attribute. That is, people tend to forget either in a motivated way, or accidentally, people will tend to minimise or trivialise the abuse to which they've been subject in some cases because maybe saying that you've been sexually abused as a child and that is why you're so screwed up at the moment um that's not necessarily a very self-benefiting thing to say. It's much easier to say something along the lines of, oh he was only a pathetic old flasher, or something like that. It kind of makes the problem more copable with apparently um. Ah equally um, just to go off at a tangent a bit, um there're a number of more radical theorists, in particular the um in the Bonnie Burstow book Radical Feminist Therapy, would say that um rather like with other forms of sexual crime, the people who've been victimised, people who've survived, are often inclined to say something along the lines of mm y'know did i did I bring it on myself kind of kind of feeling. That is um in Burstow's clinical practice she reckons that um sometimes people say something along the lines of well well um perhaps it was my fault, I was flirting with him, and things like that it and these are people who maybe have been about five or six when the abuse has happened and so y'know do five or six year olds flirt? I suspect not but erm y'know sometimes it is conceptualised, even by the people who've been victimised as a sort of two way process as as though they are partly responsible. Um, now may be, according to Burstow, this is a sort of self-serving thing as well because it's a way of saying, if you just say that that say your father sexually abused you for no good reason, that's a very frightening thing to say. It calls his integrity into question in a really big way, it also by implication calls into question the integrity of a lot of other men you might come across. So um it's much I suppose it makes the world a slightly safer place if you can say it was to do with something that you did because it brings the world slightly back under your control, maybe. It means that the world is a slightly is a slightly safer place because if you don't do this, if you don't flirt, then it won't happen. Well, that's not necessarily er an accurate way of understanding sex abuse but nevertheless it can it can perhaps help people restore their equilibrium a bit. So this business of of understanding how it happened from the, in inverted commas, victim's point of view um this business of understanding the subsequent effects, this business of understanding the extent, ah are all enormously problematic and um it's one of these things I wouldn't particularly like to have to design a survey of because it's absolutely fraught with difficulty but nevertheless some some attempts have been made um as I have indicated. Erm now erm as regards when it happens to people erm, again going back to this B B C Childwatch Survey um of girls sixty percent reported that the first incident happened when they were ten, forty percent of boys reported the first incident occurred when they were under ten so it seems, if you look at the sort of average, averages are quite deceptive in this area but nevertheless if you look at the average um it seems to happen slightly earlier for girls than for boys. Now erm I suppose also um it's worth bearing in mind that sex abuse can occur right across the right across the lifespan. Usually with people, when people get to about sixteen or eighteen, it's it's not called child sex abuse any more. It's called rape, it's called indecent assault, it's it's um er understood in the same way that sex crimes against adults are understood and erm if you look at um y'know kind of er very young kinds um according to some people called Daley and Wilson, I can't remember whether I've mentioned these on the handout but I've I've got some notes here. The first year of life is enormously dangerous in countries where the statistics are being collected. It seems that in the first year of life you're more likely than at any other time in your life to die at the hands of somebody else. Um, if you look at erm who's bringing people up, again according to Daley and Wilson, I think this is where the information originated, in Canada where they've looked at um looked at some statistics on this, if you're being brought up by step-parents you're seventy times more at risk than if you're being brought up by your as it were biological parents. So all those myths about the wicked step- father, the wicked step-mother and so forth seem almost to be true in this respect. So um again this is um looking at er y'know people when they're very young y'know sort of one year old, two years old or so. So it's looking at the very beginning bit of childhood. Now, what else have we got? Um I've got some stuff on the handout about some of the stuff that's been done about what's what happens and how long it goes on for. Now again this is one of the things we don't really know um very much about. Er I suppose as I've indicated, according to one study in 1978, twenty five percent of abuse ind involved one incident erm however some abuse was very much more long term, if you can imagine twenty five percent involved one incident but the average duration of abuse was three years. You're talking about some forms of abuse which went on for a very very long time indeed to pull the average up like that. So again it's very difficult to describe an average case er so y'know it's one of these things that er seems to vary enormously in different circumstances. Um interestingly enough, in the studies I'm mentioning here, erm it seems that um in many cases the abusers were quite effective in manipulating the situation so as to be able to get away with it, at least at the time. That is um I suppose um you could er successfully if you were an abuser successfully deceive children.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Um one of the things that you sometimes find is that the abuse is characterised is something special, something secret, something that you shouldn't tell anybody else about because it's our secret and you know what happens to people who tell secrets? Yes, of course, um er their heads fall off or something like y'know in much the same way as chil people frighten children with with with bogies and with unlikely punishments in the same way as compliance is often enforced on children. One of the reasons I think why abuse is very easily erm got away with by people is that um they're able to bring into play a lot of these a lot of these discourses with which we talk to children to make them behave, to make them er compliant. It's also the case I suppose that erm from the point of view of a child, thinking back to my own childhood, a lot of contact with grown-ups was was enormously traumatic and yet was considered by the grown-ups to be entirely legitimate. Getting taken to the doctors and getting needles stuck in you erm things like um being fed cod liver oil, things like being hit for doing things which I thought were quite legitimate like pruning my mother's geraniums and stuff like that. Um y'know all these things were not very pleasant and yet you're used as a child, you're used as a child to have grown-ups um be able to inflict things on you. I'm glad I'm grown-up now actually because er y'know it's one of my great pleasures in life to wake up in the mornings and think great I'm grown-up, I don't have to go to school and er and I don't have to live with my parents and er things are much better now than they were say sort of y'know twenty years ago or so, er giving away my age there. Erm so erm maybe because of the continuity between some forms of abusive sexual practice and erm what we expect of kids, what we train kids to do anyway um it means that abuse is easier to get away with. Now, thinking about um the people who do the abusing for a minute. Um I know er at the in the clinic and all that kind of thing, I mean goes on about these people quite a bit. Um it's interesting that when you look at people who have abused children they often will say things not only about the willingness of their victims, in inverted commas, but also about the fact oh she never said no, erm as the title of this magazine article I've got here is. Um y'know er there are ways in which ch abusers will characterise their activity as sort of fundamentally loving and gentle. Um that is here's somebody who says [reading] I was always very gentle with Clare, just caressing and stroking. When I started to touch her in a sexual way I asked her if she liked it. She never said no. Physically I could tell she was experiencing pleasure. I did it because I loved her too much []. So um sometimes the way in which abusers operate, they characterise as being somehow continuous with somehow s almost the same sort of things as as y'know kind of adult affection and love. Um sometimes they attribute pleasure to the people they're abusing. Sometimes they say, oh you can tell she's enjoying it. Um now of course when they're talking about things like physiological responses, when they're talking about things like having orgasms and the like, erm this is on the part of the victims, it's not too difficult to detach these physiological responses from pleasure. I mean they're just things that the human body does. It's sometimes the case when you look at adult survivors of child sex abuse that erm some of these physiological responses are detached from pleasure and experienced in a very ah traumatic and very de-humanising way so that y'know kind of having orgasms isn't pleasurable sometimes for people who've been abused as children. Erm it's also the case that, particularly when abuse is of this sort of y'know like I was just describing y'know stroking, caressing, all that kind of things um it a lot of erm in some cases very confused feelings on the part of the people who've been abused. It means that um particularly in therapy it can be very difficult later on because things that we would ordinarily consider to be supportive like being kind, like erm y'know kind of putting a comforting arm round somebody's shoulders, like erm y'know ways in which people express support and affection for each-other ah are very very difficult for the survivor to accept because they're sort of the part of the way in which she, and it usually is a she, has been abused in the past. So um it also means that a lot of activities which we would regard as pleasurable as adults y'know sort of intimacy, affection, sexuality. Erm again er can be understood by the sex abuse survivor as being unpleasant, disgusting, anger-provoking, fear-provoking and so forth. So um I suppose in that way some of these forms of abuse, particularly when they they use the they use the gestures, they use the language of affection um they're perhaps rather different from forms of abuse which are er er most obviously violent. Erm that is, it's usual to understand hurt and pain and such like things as being consequent upon violence. If somebody beats you up and you feel hurt and upset and it's enormously painful then you need to go to casualty afterwards erm that sort of fits the scripts y'know that's w that's that's understandable. If somebody keeps on going abo on about how much they love you, if somebody keeps on going on about they care for you and how much they'd like you to enjoy yourself and er all that kind of thing and you subsequently feel hurt, upset, abused and need to go to casualty, that's probably a lot more difficult to understand because it doesn't fit the script. Erm and that may be one of the way is which apparently affectionate abuse, if you can call it that, erm may be er in some ways more difficult to deal with than er than more frankly violent abuse. So er just because it looks like seduction doesn't mean it's not abuse, I suppose that's what I'm saying in the in the in a nutshell. Erm now erm a number of people erm, getting on t back on to the handout for a moment, er a number of people who've reported being b abused as children also report that they do try and tell people, either at the time or shortly afterwards, and this business of not being believed is quite a common report from survivors, not being believed at first. Um, it's one of these things that erm y'know for some reason er the person they tell is apt to minimise the problem, is apt to say that the accusations are malicious, is apt to say that you must have imagined it and so on and so forth. Erm sometimes erm it seems, at least according to the study, that um and possibly also the the Russell study, that often the abuse stops when something's done by the, in inverted commas, the victim. That is em if nothing happens, if the survivor, if the person being abused doesn't do anything, then the abuse carries on and the abuser y'know continues to regularly perform this these acts of abuse, whatever they might be, and erm stopping it is something that er usually involves the, in inverted commas, victim, taking control of the situ well no no well not exactly taking control but trying to do something about it er making more fuss about it to other people, moving out of the house, as sometimes happens when people are adolescents. Erm y'know those kinds of things er tend to be tend to be effective.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Erm, usually um action is prompted by well it's prompted by various things. One is as people get older, like when they get up to about fourteen or fifteen, they start um feeling perhaps a bit more self-confident, a bit more able to do something about it. Also, by that time you're erm often well into adolescence so I suppose the as it were the dangers of pregnancy become much more much more to the fore. Um also by that time er perhaps with a bit more experience of the world you've got a bit more to compare it with and you've got a strong sense that this is unjust, unreasonable and that other people don't have to suffer from it. So erm in that sense ah perhaps it's a bit easier to to take some sort of action. Um now um... getting on to the next bit of the handout erm I'll just do this next couple of paragraphs and then and then it'll be time for a break for ten minutes or so. What erm [clears throat] the trauma of of er child sex abuse is concep being conceptualised very differently, even within our own century. That is if you go back to the Kinsey sort of stuff about sexuality um you find that well I've I've stuck a quote from Kinsey et al there um that back in the 1950's there was er y'know with with ah academics like Kinsey attempting to study sexuality erm I suppose there was often er a. I'll tell you a quick story, a quick anecdote about Kinsey. Kinsey spent most of his early life studying the activities of the wasp. He wasn't really a student of human behaviour until er he was his career was well developed. Erm interestingly enough there's a report that Kinsey as a young man at college erm was approached by a friend who had this this terrible personal problem and er confessed to Kinsey that he kept feeling tempted to masturbate and he was very disturbed by this er so Kinsey and he prayed together that they would er together have the strength to give up masturbation. Erm twenty or thirty years later Kinsey was studying human sexuality and saying things like I've stuck on the handout so erm y'know in some ways perhaps Kinsey's attitude to these things er changed. But Kinsey's were I suppose is part of a general optimism about sexuality which was felt in academic circles through the 1950's and 1960's. Ah the sort of things, the sort of optimism that culminated in that y'know all those Alex Comfort books, Alex Comfort Industries plc, the Joy of Sex, More Joy of Sex, Yet More Joy of Sex y'know kind of er erm y'know kind of er erm y'know kind of so much joy of sex I'm thrilled to death y'know this kind of [LAUGHTER] kind of er all these things, Joy of S Joy of Safer Sex as it is now, trying to leap on the bandwagon. Er er all this kind of thing. This sort of optimism about sexuality that seemed to have inside it this implicit model that sexuality was a good thing, that that by erm experiencing more sexuality, more sexual pleasure, we could all be happier, nicer people, that there wasn't anything inherently wrong with sex. That sex was inherently pleasurable and mutualistic and all that kind of stuff. So um this attitude on the part of Kinsey er sort of fits into that ideology quite well. It's interesting that sexuality has been problematised in the seventies and eighties and nineties most effectively by the scholarship emerging from the Women's Movement erm who've said that y'know perhaps things aren't quite as equitable as these people have supposed, er perhaps sexuality can be abusive, look at all these instances of rape, of child sex abuse etcetera, sexual harassment and all these kinds of things. Nevertheless this sort of y'know white middle class male strand of of scholarship on sex, y'know the Kinseys, the erm alright Masters and Johnson, it was Virginia Johnson that er, nevertheless they seem to be very well in that mould, the Alex Comforts and all that kind of stuff. Um all y'know sort of very optimistic. We can all enjoy it eventually if we try hard enough sort of thing. Erm but er I suppose more recently um this business of understanding sex in relation to power, in relation to the powers of the participants, has has has effectively er knocked Kinsey's notions off the agenda in the last sort of y'know fifteen years, ten years, five years, so that people are much more erm inclined to say well physical size, disparities, erm disparities in the credibility if you like of the of the perpetrator and survivor erm and all those kinds of things make er make a big difference so it's not it's not gonna be mutualistic. It may well be inherently traumatic. Erm [clears throat] now I've stuck some next things on the handout about erm some of the things I've already I've already mentioned about er abuse of children in history. Erm then we get down to coming into the twentieth century. Erm there's um ah the origins of the myth that you can catch V D off toilet seats I suppose you could call it. Um around the middle years of the twentieth century there was ah a good deal of well people were spotting signs which would nowadays be taken as evidence of child sex abuse but they were giving other explanations for them. That is um when sexually transmitted diseases turned up in children, well it must be towels, it must be toilets, it must be clothes, bed linen erm, this is where the infection's come from apparently. This was what was said by professionals. Um it's also the case that um particularly round about that time there was an an idea that children were not competent enough to know what had happened to them, not competent enough to know their own minds. Possibly if they did tell you something then it was likely to be made up because children didn't know it was wrong to lie. All those kind of things were were seemed to be ideas that were were floating around round about that time. These are catalogued in um well I've referenced it to Bartman 1990 but you'll see more about this erm in, let me see, there's Dennis Howitt's book concerning psychology which has a chapter about erm child sex abuse in it and there's also a book that the library's got called Child Abuse Errors by Dennis Howitt as well erm which has go deals with some of these these issues and arguments too. Um and erm that might be that's one of th some of the few things that the library's got but erm er anyway. That's erm moving along a little bit erm there's also this business of of what I suppose in other contexts has been called blaming the victim, this business of children somehow inviting the the, if they have actually been abused, it must be because they've invited it so erm that's erm. Now as it approaches the witching hour of um the witching hour of ten to ten I suggest we all go and run about a little bit for for ten minutes and I'll do something about some of the emotional effects and some of the therapies in the next hour for all those who're interested... hello tape recorder, there'll be another hour in a minute. Oh hello Erm I haven't seen him yet this morning er so I'm not quite sure um he might be. Er ah I think he was intending to come in. I know he was off he was off sick on Tuesday er but it's I know he was hoping to come in today I know so it's worth a look Oh right erm yeah oh right so you're doing
[speaker001:] should there be more handouts?
[Brown:] Um er excuse me, [shouting] are there any more handouts in the room []?
[speaker001:] I've got one
[Brown:] You got one spare? Oh right yeah good Er I'm afraid not no I'm sorry
[speaker001:] D'you know if has?
[Brown:] Er you might try he's often fairly B P S'ish yeah erm and em if you managed to find he's always got loads of bumf about jobs in psychology and stuff like that. Er he gets the the American Psychological Association Monitor as well which as got like jobs in the States too.
[speaker001:] Okay then
[Brown:] Not that you well you may not be interested in that but y'know it's there's plenty of variety as it were yeah
[speaker001:] only have them from about last November
[Brown:] Ah yeah so they're well out of date by then presumably. yeah yeah yeah
[speaker001:] just thought I'd ask. Okay yeah I'll try thank you, erm my name's
[Brown:] Ah right yes so let me see, you were the one who said that you were getting to the S P S S stage or something were you?
[speaker001:] Yeah yeah well I've done it and I just want to check with you that what we've done is right and then I can er
[Brown:] yeah yeah and fine now I think somebody's coming to see me at eleven and then I'm teaching from twelve til two, somebody's coming to see me at two but a bit later on this afternoon or on Monday morning I can do
[speaker001:] er Monday morning probably
[Brown:] Well come and find me Monday morning then
[speaker001:] Right what do I some time at about eleven o'clock
[Brown:] Erm that's when it starts to get busy because there's like the there's like the eleven til three kind of kind of kind of busy time er
[speaker001:] I've got a lecture before that
[Brown:] er mhm alright
[speaker001:] Can I come at three?
[Brown:] Yeah because I'm doing second year abnormal from two til three so you might be able to catch me at three
[speaker001:] So if I come, I'll come at three
[Brown:] Yeah yeah and sort of bring your bring your questionnaire
[speaker001:] bring my disk
[Brown:] and bring your disk and we'll see what it looks like
[speaker001:] Okay
[Brown:] right, okay, right
[speaker001:] Thanks very much
[Brown:] Oh hello. Yes I saw your notes yesterday um now projects and stuff like that. I mean what what's happening? Mhm oh right. So let's see, you had a questionnaire last time last time
[speaker001:] yeah
[Brown:] we spoke I mean how's that right okay em are you free a bit later on this afternoon, probably around about threeish possibly? No erm any any time any other time later on today? No? What about earlyish on Monday. I'm free earlyish on Monday. What about, is it a big hassle you getting in for nine?
[speaker001:] No
[Brown:] No okay because it's as I was saying usually between sort of round about the middle of the day there's people knocking on the door all the time so if you can sort of get sort of earlier or later it's we're likely to have a y'know half an hour when I can show you to do S P S S on it.
[speaker001:] Right
[Brown:] So if you bring a questionnaire and erm er we'll go through it and I'll show you sort of how to define the variable list and and y'know kind of how to enter the date and stuff, show you a give you a copy of the data file that I've got that actually works so if you just sort of follow the syntax it'll yeah so erm so that's okay. Now are you still still interested in humour and such like things? Yes right. Interestingly enough I've got a book er back in my office about things like T V comedy and situation comedy and stuff like that and also y'know kind of variety sort of comedy with sketches and s y'know Two Ronnies, Monty Pythons and stuff erm would that be of any use to you if you were to borrow it? Yeah? So erm have you any further thoughts yourself or y'know any further things you've done or mhm Mhm right erm so I mean what does it look like it's gonna be turning into? Is it gonna be turning into something that looks a bit like a survey do you think? Or is it gonna be turning into something that looks like analysis of... oh right so it's like listen to yep fair enough listen to er a joke and er well I'll tell you what, can you speak up a bit so we can actually get the conversation on here because the I'm sure the British National Corpus would be interested. Erm er so erm yeah I mean that's that's er a fair way to proceed I think y'know if if you have video tapes or tape recordings of stuff Yeah so erm yeah so if you get that sort of thing and then you can in some way either get people to discuss or get them to fill in a questionnaire about it or something of the sort I mean that's er the format that y'know kind of er seems to work quite well for final year projects anyway er generally speaking with other stuff so er yeah that's that's do-able. Um so it's a matter of um do you know yet really what sort of material you'll be erm you'll be using er
[speaker001:] Well
[Brown:] Yeah mhm yeah I mean you may want to select some stuff that's y'know that represents different kinds of things because as I remember our conversations earlier, you were interested in er y'know sort of ideological soundness, political correctness and y'know were some things funny but sort of off-colour for other reasons erm er I'm paraphrasing it badly but er y'know I think that th s so you might want to get some stuff that's sort of ideologically sound and humorous and er some stuff that's a bit off-colour and humorous and some stuff that's erm sort of I don't know some stuff that's main stream but has got a lot of y'know if you look at something like say The Two Ronnies or something, there's a lot of there's a lot of racism and sexism in there but it's because it's sort of main stream because it's family viewing and stuff like that people tend not to think of it as problematic. Erm y'know erm it's also erm perhaps interesting the way things have er have shifted you know in the last decade or so, like that thing that erm used to be on in the seventies, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, with um a number of people pretending to be Indians and and exhibiting all the stereotypes y'know it ain't half racist mum is probably more erm er in fact there was a book called It Ain't Half Racist Mum that er Leicester University library had er y'know going on about exactly that you know the sort of y'know racism of comedy. Erm and er so er y'know there's all sorts of well depends on what you can find and what you think's suitable. Um generally speaking you know if you you might want to use sort of fairly y'know sort of fairly brief extracts y'know sort of five or ten minutes or something like that maybe and get people to y'know respond to it and so on. Um and er so yeah if you sort of do something along those lines um so y'know sort of find some extracts and think of some questions I would've thought. Um and also it may be possible to y'know you may want to start out by showing people some stuff and trying to get them to talk about it so you you understand the sort of language concepts, repertoires, or whatever you want to call them, that people are actually using to try try and work out some more formal questions from that and move on to a questionnaire type thing y'know I mean that's a possibility. Or you may want to do discussions sessions and and er try and content analyse or discourse analyse the discussions. I mean that's a possibility. Erm it helps of course if you can find some some sort of linkage with some some y'know things that've been written about I don't know humour and something Oh was that George Payton and various other people? Yeah erm so er yeah right that's er because I mean what's nice to see in these things is if you're able to tell some sort of coherent little story from er y'know kind of these er people's ideas, themes, speculations, evidence from previous studies and all that kind of thing and this is this is the data that we've got that tells us something about those and says how misconceived they all are or how it may confirm them or whatever and then y'know a couple of bits sort of so it's like a nice narrative but sort of fairly y'know sort of continuous argument going through which is nice to see and so er yeah. So if you find some yeah find some yeah it's a matter of y'know getting some stuff erm getting some stuff together. Erm so er is there anything else we need to worry about at this stage do you think?
[speaker001:] Erm I can't really do very much until I've got
[Brown:] Mhm yeah yeah but er well anyway if you get some stuff together and we'll see we'll see how it goes but er yeah so I think you'll probably find you'll have to work quite briskly erm
[speaker001:] yeah right well have you succeeded in getting other stuff out of the way? Oh good oh right so er so you can you can do project for a few weeks fairly solidly before the end of term course when deadlines start looming. Yeah great yeah so that's erm that's good right good okay yeah. Well, best of luck to you and er right I'll see you on Monday Right
[Brown:] Right okay cheers [sigh]... oh hello
[speaker001:] child sex abuse you know where the children abuse other children
[Brown:] Yeah well we're talking about sort of. Erm if it's um well generally speaking I think, thinking about what the sort of consensus would be among people who who study this sort of thing, they're usually looking for some sort of of discrepancy in ages or powers or something. Erm I mean kids can do, of a similar age, can do enormously abusive things to each-other in which case it's often thought of as things like bulling or erm or or something like that y'know I mean for example I know somebody who attende was educated at Rugby and you know he was he was buggered silly by the other boys who also wired him up to the mains and stuck billiard cues up his bum and all sort of things. Er so I suppose y'know in a sense that's true, there is the sort of sexual element to some of that bullying that goes on. Um I think um where I've seen things that er discussed under the heading of child sex abuse erm er it's often the case that um y'know maybe in some families you find the situation where there's a daughter who's being abused by the father and then when the brother gets old enough to take an interest in sexuality, he joins in as well sort of thing and it's er y'know it's like there's two blokes abusing the girl. Um so I mean that can sometimes occur. Er when there's already an abusive sort of dynamic going on erm y'know other people who are more similar in age can can can get [clears throat] can start participating in that. Um I'm not quite sure wheth whether you'd call it bullying, whether you'd call it child sex abuse, whether you'd whatever you call it I think depends on the ages of the participants and depends on on the perspective of the person who's describing it as well
[speaker001:] I suppose it depends on exactly what's occurring and
[Brown:] Yeah mhm. Oh hello there. Oh right yeah. Erm, oh not too bad thanks. Now erm I've still got some stuff to do about child sex abuse for the next hour or so. Were you intending to?
[speaker001:] just called to say hello got the video
[Brown:] Oh right yes. Erm ah some people were looking for you earlier. Did they come and see you? Yeah right yes yeah right yes good. Yes I'm I'm microphoned up. It's the British National Corpus, they're trying to record languages that is used in the U K
[speaker001:] Oh excellent excellent
[Brown:] today sort of thing and erm er we're recording the lecture. Sorry, were you trying to say something? Oh you're after alright yeah
[speaker001:] That's an interesting sweatshirt there [LAUGHTER]
[Brown:] Yeah Mhm well I tell you what, do you want to record something? record some language in the tape recorder?
[speaker001:] This is five Anglo Saxon Bollocks
[Brown:] Mhm dear
[speaker001:] There's a Scottish haggis faced bastard here
[Brown:] It's still going, it's a very long tape in here
[speaker001:] language I remember you saying in the first year when you first came to Birmingham
[Brown:] yeah yeah
[speaker001:] and I thought it was hysterical, it was the fact that you noticed when you first came here about if somebody liked you they always greeted you by swearing at you [LAUGHTER]
[Brown:] Oh right
[speaker001:] it's like oh alright
[Brown:] I must I must have been I must have been on good form that day
[speaker001:] You you were
[Brown:] [LAUGHTER]
[speaker001:] and I thought I thought that's true that's true because I do that
[Brown:] I don't remember that
[speaker001:] phone them up and they say, alright you fat old bastard how're you doing?
[Brown:] Oh yes good yeah. I know I did a thing on the phone with somebody once where erm er let's see what it was, oh I was going round to his house to cut some ends of bricks of a wall with er with a big angle grinder and I phoned up and said, hello this Leicester Brick Decapitation Services, I gather you've got some bricks who's heads need cutting off, and it was the wrong person
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]
[Brown:] So er I said oh I do beg your pardon, is there? Er no, said this person after a distinct pause
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]
[Brown:] and erm er I said, I'm terribly sorry I've got the wrong number. That's interesting, there's a little there's a little thing in either end of this microphone er I wonder which erm perhaps it's supposed to be on the directional? It'd be interesting to play this back and see what er see what's
[speaker001:] listen all your ahs and your ums and your ers
[Brown:] Oh yes well yes I mean it would be nice of we could sort of clean those out of the the soundtrack and all the stumbles over words an Erm yes it is yes it is because language language languages if you actually write down real language that people say it's gibberish. Erm yeah if you try and transcribe stuff, as I discovered doing my P HD you know, I didn't realise how much gibberish was talked and often things the meaning's clear in the conversation but if you listen to the words or l w read the words later y'know you haven't a clue what they're on about and yet you're fairly sure Er I don't think so. I think I'm doing it Oh right oh right
[speaker001:] about the way we treat children. I remember when I was a child that occasionally my parents would have visitors to the house, people that I'd never set
[Brown:] yeah
[speaker001:] eyes on before and when it was time for me to go to bed I would be encouraged not made
[Brown:] to kiss them to kiss them
[speaker001:] kiss these people goodnight
[Brown:] Oh God I remember things like that. Oh no
[speaker001:] Well is that isn't that absolutely tragic
[Brown:] Oh God I can st I can still remember Auntie Edie and her mouth full of rotten teeth, oh dear, whom I'd never met before
[speaker001:] it was a stranger
[Brown:] and we were well it was somebody who was a stranger to me but allegedly she was related to the family or something
[speaker001:] Cos all adults are called auntie and uncle aren't they as well because
[Brown:] yes it sort of familiarises them and makes them seem like they're relatives and stuff yeah
[speaker001:] I can remember being made to kiss these strangers, even when I was say about nine, eight or nine, I can remember feeling quite embarrassed about having to do it
[Brown:] Yeah well I I remember it was more a it was more or less like a feeling of physical revulsion er I felt erm on occasions like that, partly because of the person but partly because it was a bit of an imposition on on my on my intimacy as it were y'know erm so er
[speaker001:] try to understand children. I can remember as a child being very nearly it's my body and nobody else should be touching it.
[Brown:] Yeah yeah
[speaker001:] I didn't like it I mean er as you say
[Brown:] Yeah and erm yeah I mean that's one of the things that tends to to happen to kids and it's almost like when you're a kid your body isn't your own
[speaker001:] That's right
[Brown:] Erm and that's I suppose was the point I was trying to make earlier that al that's why abusers sometimes find it very easy because they're able to tap into a lot of the ways in which we treat children um y'know so er
[speaker001:] like if you ever work in a children's ward you can always tell the children that've been hospitalised for a great length of time cos you can do anything with them
[Brown:] So they're like fairly
[speaker001:] totally passive
[Brown:] So they're used to have thermometers stuck in them an and have the have the bed pan slipped underneath them yeah mhm and and presumably even if they're not floppy as a result of their illness they'll they'll sort of go floppy after er a period of institutionalisation yeah mhm yeah yeah mhm so er. Well that's interesting well I'll er d do you mind if I mention that when we start the lecture again because that's a good example erm yeah. Sorry were you about to say something?
[speaker001:] what about what about the parents who let it go on?
[Brown:] Erm gonna talk a little bit about family dynamics and stuff like that in a in a short while, hopefully, if I get time erm so anyway I think it's almost enough people back in to er
[speaker001:] Do you have a handout for me please?
[Brown:] Erm not any more I don't I've given them all away [shouting] hello, are there any spare handouts in the room? Anywhere at the back or anything? [] Erm no, well have a look up at the back and see if you can see anything. Mhm yeah mhm yeah
[speaker001:] get ready
[Brown:] Oh right erm yeah erm well I dunno I'm I'm almost tempted to want to start again now er so er mhm yeah mhm.... oh good, hello people, mhm mhm It's a bunch of people, Universities, Publishers, erm some funding from Central Government, some from er research councils of various kinds are trying to make a sort of record of current usage of the English language and I think Longmans are intr interested in it for example f from the point of view of dictionaries and stuff like that. Erm I've got er ah just a minute oh it's got them on here. Look, British Library Chambers I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon I've actually committed myself to tape and made a big faux pas. It's Oxford University Press and Chambers. It's n er I can't see Longmans. Erm there's Lancaster University, there's Oxford University
[speaker001:] oh right
[Brown:] Erm and
[speaker001:] Is it about is it about discourse then erm or
[Brown:] Erm I
[speaker001:] language in general?
[Brown:] I think, I'm not quite sure how they're gonna attempt to analyse it. Erm whether it's to do just with the words, like for dictionaries usage y'know or whether it's to do with erm how language is strung together, functional use of grammar or whether it's to do with units and repertoires and bigger units or whether it's to do even with ideologies or yeah
[speaker001:] Oh right
[Brown:] Mhm so I mean well it it's gonna be an archive and maybe people can who want to to analyse everyday language can get tape recordings from it and er y'know perhaps it can be used in scholarship, perhaps it can be used in socio-linguistics or whatever. Em I dunno quite erm
[speaker001:] So it's not
[Brown:] Not, well this one specifically this but er I mean there's tapes being taken all over the place. Erm and all manner of people have been invited to participate and Aston was and I think got this initially but he's passed it on to me er so er yeah anyway let's let's see if I can get the thing rolling again. Mhm yeah mhm Erm there was but, have a look on the top of that slide projector, I think there's some on there. Erm sorry I gave them all away I'm afraid mhm yeah so er I'm tempted to start rolling again in a moment so would you like to make an announcement yeah?
[speaker001:] Er hello everybody. Can I just make an announcement about the videos. Erm I've got this the er the erm Carl Rogers video which er is in principle an awful awful copy, you can't hear it, it's a terribly recording er but er you may w oh gosh I can speak into that, how exciting. Erm so so you er may want to stop at eleven o'clock, or ten to eleven or whatever and watch the video. I think what I'll do, you've got about forty minutes of it today, you'll get Carl Rogers working with a client called er and then we'll stop there and then next week you'll see the er the next behaviourist called er called erm Arnold Lazarus, okay, who you might wan he's got a book called Multi Modal Therapy which was a big hit about ten years ago and there's about five copies in the library. Who was I talking to about books? Yes, have a look at Arnold Lazarus and Multi Modal Therapy. Erm so what you get is you get Rogers this week working with client and then you get Arnold Lazarus the following week and then after that you then get er you then get then you then get the client saying what she thought of it all which is quite interesting as well, so erm what I'll do is I'll put it on to about when finished really
[Brown:] Yeah okay well I'll I'll try and give you five minutes before eleven o'clock so er so you can nip over to the video room or wherever it's being played. Oh it's in here? Right okay yeah.
[speaker001:] And er, the other people, was it was it eleven o'clock on Monday people? Eleven o'clock Monday is that right, yeah? So what I'll do is I'll have the video tape in er with on Monday. I won't be in on Monday so people will have to come in on Monday somebody will have to come in on Monday, go to the room specified which I haven't agreed yet and then put it on and then bring it back again to so people who can't make it today, that that's the alternative arrangement but I'll tell you more when I come back at eleven o'clock, okay?
[Brown:] Right mhm and no problem. Okay right now erm let's continue with, I beg your pardon, let's continue with chi sorry are y oh never mind, okay right cheers right. Erm okay let's let's keep rolling along with erm with child abuse. Interestingly enough in the interval there's a couple of interesting observations been made by by various of you which I'd like to mention before we actually get back on to the handout as it were. Erm, first of all, what if the abuser and the abused are around about the same age? Would it still be considered child sex abuse? Well erm there's a lot of there's a lot of abuse that goes on between kids of similar ages, often in schools, and we call it things like bullying. Usually to be defined as child sex abuse I think w for most authors there'd need to be some kind of discrepancy in the ages in some way, that is y'know if somebody was about thirteen and the other person was about eighteen it might be ah starting to get er a big enough discrepancy to be outside the realm of of y'know kind of normal y'know sort of boyfriend and girlfriend to use those saccarinous terms erm relationships and maybe might be considered to be er to be something like child abuse. Erm maybe also erm if you look at things that happen, particularly in closed institutions in closed environments. Erm like erm for example I knew somebody who was educated at Rugby and during his time there he was abused enormously by the other kids. Erm he was buggered silly to put it er very crudely erm and not only that but they used to wire each-other up to the mains and and stick er snooker cues up each-other's backsides and a whole range of activities used to go on. Erm all the s all the all the rumours you hear about public schools seem to be true. Erm and this can leave people obviously with a number of traumas and a number of difficulties to deal with later on in life. Um so er but nevertheless those sort of things aren't often considered to be child sex abuse. Erm indeed there are many within in the education system, particularly older men seem to have this attitude in my experience, that y'know it's just it's just boys messing about and having a good time. Erm, I don't know. Erm y'know it's one of these things that er that's often been rather condoned,o particularly if you're looking at the education system. There, in this country, more so than any other country in Europe, there's a tradition of adults abusing children quite legitimately as well in the form of beating them and erm indeed headmasters of Eton back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century were often selected, not because of their scholarly ability, but because of their size and strength. Erm there's the legendary Doctor Keat of Eton who er was was erm legendary precisely because he beat the boys so often and so vigorously. Um if you go back to the eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, you find that um I think it was at er Winchester possibly, er some some of you may have heard of this in in History or something, er there was an uprising at Winchester school and the Army had to be called in to quell the rioting pupils because they were rebelling against the harsh conditions. Anyway erm so erm you sometimes also find with family situations, let's suppose in some situations you have some you have a daughter in the household who's being abused by say the father or step-father, maybe if there's a brother once he gets old enough to start becoming interested in sex, in some cases, although he's round about the same age as his sister, can be um as it were inducted into the into the cycle of abuse erm can actually start participating when the dynamic's already there. Erm another thing is, going back to the point about erm er when you're a child grown-ups often do rather unpleasant things to you and expect you to comply. Erm er just made an observation about er experience in hospital with children and apparently when kids have been in hospital for a length of time they don't object so much when you go along and stick a the
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Um often this is one of these things that's er a vicious circle
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] I've mentioned briefly there is um er, let me see, it's, women who've been abused show more need for power than a comparable group of unabused women. Need for power is is one of things, it's rather like erm need for achievement or something like that. Erm I suppose the theory is that um somehow the experience of disempowerment, the experience of abuse, is is something er that prompts this greater need in later life. Er perhaps it er perhaps it also prompts a greater fear of not being in control, a greater fear of of er not being in in some way in command of the situation because then somebody might do something to you. Now erm how have we got er I've next thing on the handout is something I've stuck on about the way in which erm er well it's what I've just covered about the the way in which some sorts of therapies for people who've been abused as children tend to embody rather heterosexist assumptions which has been stated by Jenny Kissinger for example. Erm er also um I've stuck in a note about the difficulty in interpreting the consequences of abuse erm because of the way in which um you may find, as did, looking at people who've been abused as children er versus people who haven't. If you look at the way they report they remember what their family environment was like, what their home environment was like as as kids erm you find that they generally have much less positive recollections than people who weren't abused as children. So maybe it's difficult to separate out the consequences of abuse per se from the consequences of erm lousy emotional environment, from the consequences of neglect and deprivation, from the consequences of a whole range of non-sexual abuses which you may find in the kinds of environment where child sex abuse is more likely. Now I'm not saying in this that child sex abuse is specific to one particular class or group of people in society. It seems to cut across most social divisions. Erm y'know you can't say, oh it's more common in this particular group of people because they live in Manchester or something like that. Y'know it's it's one of these things that isn't confined to a particular region, isn't confined to a particular class or ethnic group or anything like that. Erm however, you do find some indications from some studies that people report rather more negative things about their er about their early home environment. Now, erm on the subject of of the family, it's worth mentioning another erm sort of debate that goes on within the subject of child sex abuse, the business of I suppose you might call it the business of responsibility. Now if you fi go back to sort of in the 1970's and the nineteen possibly into the 1980's erm there was er a certain amount of emphasis on disrupted family dynamics, there's something wrong with the families where this kind of thing occurs. There is something wrong with the relationships, there is as well as somebody doing the abuse, there are other people who are somehow complicit in the abuse because they're allowing it to go on, they must have known, surely they must have known, why didn't they do something? In the typical scenario erm you have the parents as villains of the peace, you have the children or the child as being abused, you have ah typically in the er as it were the stereotypical scenario, you have the father doing the abuse, you have a certain amount of responsibility pointed at the mother. Why didn't you do something about it? Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't you throw him out? Why didn't you report him? Etcetera etcetera. Now I suppose that kind of model of what goes on in families has been disrupted a bit in the last few years because increasingly people have drawn attention to the way in which um often the person doing the abuse is the most powerful person within that family situation. Erm often it's the father, often the abuse is going on in connection with a whole range of processes whereby that person dominates the climate in that household. Nobody in particular, and I s I use the word him, nobody particularly wants to question him, nobody particularly wants to get him in a bad mood. Erm often you find that that particular person is the one who's in whose name the mortgage is, or in whose name the bills are, the one who's bringing the wages home and that kind of thing and this erm power, this domination, has been suggested as one of the reasons why some people, some other members of the family, like like wives, like mothers, aren't always able effectively to do something about it. This sort of economic and social domination that goes on across the whole family. Um so um the business of family dynamics again is one of these contentious areas in er understanding child abuse. Erm there have been erm, I should have written it down actually because I've I've just gone a complete blank, there was that erm that famous case in the States ah and there were two people who'd erm I think the main impetus for the abuse of their child came from the came from the man came from the husband and there was a great deal of er debate as to why the woman hadn't successfully protected the child or successfully done something about it er and I've forgotten the names of the people and I've forgotten when it was. I should have written it down, sorry about that, that was a completely useless digression. Erm er anyway, never mind, um so um also erm particularly from a feminist perspective this idea of of so-called faulty family dynamics has been called into question by people like for example Hall and Lloyd who were saying that um, something along the lines of if you if you blame the family as a whole then this draws attention away from the fact that it's not the families who do the abusing, it's often, from their point of view, it was often the men that do. So erm y'know there's a sense in which some people feel rather suspicious of this sort o y'know the family dynamics type theories because it draws attention away from the responsibility of the people who actually do the abuse. Erm anyway right that's er a quick observation on the as it were the dynamics of of abuse. Now, remembering being abused as a child. Again this is another contentious area. Sometimes people have vivid and compelling memories of being abused. Sometimes people have um a whole variety of symptoms in later life and perhaps as a consequence of some sort of therapy, some sort of consciousness raising exercise, something like that erm they are not necessarily aware at the start that they've been abused but sometimes they feel y'know a very compelling sense of memories flooding back. Y'know that somehow um, perhaps rather like the psychoanalytic notion of repression, something like that, somehow um er they've been unable to remember for a number of years, possibly even decades, and er something triggers it. Erm I've mentioned a couple of things on the handout, one from this paper by Sigmund, another from I think this is in the British Journal of Psychiatry, I think they were writing. Um and erm y'know maybe there's particular events, sometimes it's therapy, sometimes it's something else um which prompts the memories of of being abused. Um now the process of remembering abuse again is another area of contemporary debate. Erm often accusing people of abusing you when you were a child is quite, in some ways, quite a risky thing to do because they, understandably perhaps, get rather huffy about it. Er they get rather sulky and offended to say the least, they get er, often they recruit academics and lawyers to say that the memories of abuse are fabricated, the memories of abuse they couldn't really have happened because the people concerned were out of the country at the time and were on holiday anyway and er didn't even meet the family until the kid was eleven years old after it was sup and so on and so forth. There's an in er a strong tendency to call the the testimony of people who've been abused into question in this way. Um in particular there's this constructive false memory syndrome that erm people are in some ways quite keen on.
[speaker001:] [sneeze]
[Brown:] That is, according to false memory syndrome theorists, somehow the process of therapy, the process of disclosure, the process of interviewing people to find out the details of the abuse, somehow that constructs the abuse itself, somehow that's erm the thing that's that's causing the memories. Um somehow it's not really to do with whether they were abused or not as children, somehow it's the it's the therapist. Particularly if there's any suggestion that anything a bit like hypnosis has been used um this er business of of well it must be the therapist making them up or putting them up to it in some way becomes a particular argument that's raised quite often. Um so erm I did have some I did have some references on this which erm unfortunately I I put to one side and I've succeeded in losing so erm I didn't get the chance to put them on the handout but erm I'm just alerting you to that area of debate and that area of enquiry. Um interestingly enough, when you think about the way in which memory is conceptualised and understood in cognitive psychology, um memory increasingly these days seems to be being understood as a sort of active constructive process anyway. Um it's almost as if the debate about false memory syndrome is embedded in an older notion of memory, embedded in a notion of memory as if it were either literally true or literally false, embedded in a notion of memory which sees memories as things like larders or cupboards or filing cabinets and um y'know people pick the memories out and get them out and and display them to other people. Um, as we know from studies of re story telling, as we know from studies of memories for story structure and recall, memories for everyday events mm there's er a substantial way in which memories are scripted, which memories um seem to fit a schemer, which memories ah aren't stored as a literal description of something but they're something that we re-construct as we tell them. Er there's a sense also in which memories may not be an individual phenomenon but may be a collective phenomena and if you listen to families reminiscing about things or people who've know each-other for a long time reminiscing about things, different people supply different details, they contradict one-another, they erm fill things in, they say no it can't have been then because um because that was the Christmas when Uncle Sydney had his kidney stones and um y'know stuff like that. Um and then people say, oh yes I remember now and then they tell a slightly different story. Um so er y'know um in that context calling a particular set of memories false is is sort of rather misses the point um y'know in a sense all the memories we have are fabrications. Erm that um anyway er that's a slight aside so erm when you hear people going on about false memory syndrome it tends to pre-suppose that there are certain memories which are true by contrast um which isn't necessarily always going to be the case. Um anyway um so erm there are things, there are sometimes things that er that trigger memories. Um I've got an example from the Ronnie Burstow book er let's see. Erm oh I don't know. Here's here's an example of a bit of erm I think slightly cleaned up therapeutic conversation. Erm, [reading] client, I'm really scared, I don't have any control over the bulimia. You know I throw up food without even wanting to. Councillor, I know and it must be really upsetting. Let me ask you something, does this happen more often with any particular type of food? Client, it could happen with anything. Well actually it's more with things that're runny you know like drippy egg whites. Councillor, the texture bothers you. Client, it's so messy, disgusting really. Councillor, that's an interesting word that you've used there. You often describe things as disgusting and when you do your mouth wrinkles up like you really can't stand the taste. When you used that word in our session last week you were talking of the taste of semen. Client, yeah. Councillor, you're looking disgusted now, are you okay? Client, you know there's something I'd forgotten all about. When I first had oral sex I was like totally out and I started retching. There's something else too. The taste was familiar. I knew that taste from childhood []. So maybe m y'know kind of the process of of of reconstructing memories, the process of remembering um is prompted by other things. It's prompted by therapy sessions, it's prompted by other kinds of tastes and feelings and ideas. Erm hello. Erm and erm it's something that we're not necessarily consciously aware of all the time but y'know kind of for some reason they're called back to mind. Now erm as it approaches the witching hour of twenty to eleven, I'll try and finish off erm reasonably briskly. Erm what I've mentioned then on the handout is some stuff about um er the business of traumagenic dynamics and the possibility that some of the consequences of child sex abuse cold be thought of as as er post-traumatic stress disorder. There's a somebody called Finklehall who's quite interested in understanding the the dynamics of abuse which I've quoted from here. Um now I think maybe um again there's this there's this notion of of people developing distorted beliefs, distorted perceptions and so forth. Um and I think there's some acknowledgement in these quotes I've got under end results, classifications and syndromes which um I suppose there's some acknowledgement that maybe these things were adaptive at the time but maybe once people are grown up they're not quite so adaptive. Erm that somehow coping strategies which people developed at the time are counter-productive when they when they're a bit older, so that's the general erm er kind of of impetus behind that. Um now er just to finish off um I've mentioned very briefly on the handout some different kinds of of er approaches to therapy um that people have used. Um just going through them, obviously there's some benefit in having a good therapeutic relationship. Erm sometimes er I haven't mentioned much about the gender of the therapist but sometimes it can help a great deal if the therapist's the same gender as the same person who's undergoing therapy and it also helps if it's er sometimes you can't very easily with some therapists, y'know it sometimes erm helps if it's somebody you can trust and confide in and stuff like that and obviously, having met various psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, er quite a number of them are not people I'd particularly like to talk about about being abused as a child. Erm I think one of the one of the exceptions is actually. I could I could really er enjoy being counselled or or having some sort of therapeutic relationship with him er strangely enough but er y'know. Erm but not everybody's quite so erm y'know not everybody gets on with everybody and um this kind of what you might call personal chemistry, to lapse for a moment into pharmacological determinism er maybe helps um maybe helps a bit. Erm there's also a feeling, this business of c almost like catharsis that re-telling re- telling the events, re-telling the experience ah is somehow is somehow curative, is somehow therapeutic. Ah this is a thing which um maybe is quite difficult to do, particularly as we have a culture of stiff upper lips and erm er a culture of of not making a fuss about things and a culture of particularly telling children not to make a fuss about things, a culture of trying to ensure that children can't legitimately make a fuss about things.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Brown:] Like when my mother was a kid in the 1930's they didn't used to use anaesthesia for taking out your first set of teeth if they were to take them out, up in the round Newcastle. They thought well kids just make a fuss anyway and they haven't got any proper routes so what're they making all that fuss about y'know, shut up, um and er that kind of things was going on. So er sometimes it's it's very erm difficult to re-live these particular experiences. Um going back to this business of people who've been abused at er as part of, well not exactly abused, people who've been severely bullied in in sc in the school system, erm particularly when you're talking about all boys schools, I mean this is one of the problems that they have to contend with. There are some sort of public schools survivors groups which have been set up recently and um it's interesting that this business of being strong and silent um is a kind of is a kind of nineteenth century hangover and I think it affects men and I think it affects women too to some extent. Erm, have I told you about Thomas Carlisle very much before? Thomas Carlisle was er one of the writers in the nineteenth century who was very keen on this business of being strong and silent and a productive worker and a and a competent breadwinner and he advocated this as the best way of being a man. Erm, of self-discipline, of self-control and all that kind of thing. Thomas Carlisle himself wasn't very much like that. He was he was a hypochondriac, he detailed his er what he ate and his bowel movements in almost obsessive detail. Um Thomas Carlisle um wen was very much impressed by the work of people like Wordsworth and Coleridge because they were just a bit before him and he actually went and met Coleridge. Thomas Carlisle as a young man was absolutely disgusted by Coleridge because Coleridge was all sort of fat and flabby and had ha frilly cravats and and was a was a was a dopehead and a heroin addict and er sat around all day in a darkened room and took drugs and drank and stuff like that, which um disillusioned Carlisle very much. What a terrible thing it is for our literary establishment to be peopled by degenerates like this, he felt. So erm nevertheless we have er the spirit of Thomas Carlisle walks abroad amongst us even now so er sometimes this business of going through traumatic experiences, particularly in front of another person, can be very very difficult for us to do. Yeah erm there's some um most of that stuff is fairly self-explanatory. Um maybe um maybe maybe maybe maybe ah as it's about ten to I shan't elaborate on many of those points too much. Erm now what I want to say at the very very end is a quick observation by Beatrix Campbell who wrote a book about the Cleveland er child sex abuse scandal which took place in the late 1980's. In Cleveland um there were a number of cases of child sex abused diagnosed, I think somewhere somewhere in the region of between one and two hundred altogether, by a controversial process called the anal dilation reflex. That is um if you erm if you make children er sort of lie down on their fronts with their bums in their air and you and bums in their air and you touch anuses apparently the anus dilates, or it can do, erm allegedly in children who've been sexually abused in that way, in children who've been who've been penetrated anally. Now this procedure was used to, in inverted commas, diagnose a number of children in the Cleveland area as having been sexually abused. Erm there was a big scandal about it and there was a report by um Butler Schloss which recommended, among other things, a whole range of safeguards and checks and balances of procedures so that this sort of, oh my God, this tragedy mustn't happen in future. So um that kind of thing b according to Campbell may be one of the reasons why the Cleveland scandal was so scandalous was because it intersected with a number of cultural fears we have about the relationship between sexuality and the anus for some reason. Um maybe it was particularly controversial because it seemed to be accusing er people, men in the family, particularly fathers, of having abused their children anally with all this sort of y'know homosexual connotations of that which activated the number of, as well as a number of fears about about child sex abuse and being a child abuser, it activated a number of rather more homophobic fears, both among the people so accused and in c our culture generally and er that perhaps explains why this er particular incident was so was so compelling and attracted so much com er publicity, according to Campbell anyway. So erm right now I think we might as well erm allow things to draw naturally to a close there so um let's see erm this gives you a few minutes to catch your breath in time for video, for those of you who're erm intending to watch it. Um so er well thanks very much for your attention... Erm yeah certainly if you if you so desire Um yep yeah I don't think er I don't think I'll need it. I'll bung you on my list now
[speaker001:] have you had chance to look at the
[Brown:] Erm yeah I've had a bit of a look at it but my eyes glazed over at about one thirty. Er are you intending to, do you want to come and see me now, or do you wanna watch video? Erm because you can come and see me and we'll we we can talk about it a bit because I actually have got some thoughts. Er
[speaker001:] Em I think I'll talk to you now
[Brown:] Okay fine yeah I'll just pick up my papers. Hello
[speaker001:] Erm would I be able to come and see you to er any time this afternoon about my project?
[Brown:] Yes please do erm
[speaker001:] questionnaire's entirely changed from the one I
[Brown:] Ah right yeah
[speaker001:] I think it's more to the point cos what I was doing at Christmas wasn't really exploring the attitudes as I wanted to
[Brown:] Yeah erm
[speaker001:] but it's very long and I don't know
[Brown:] Mhm Er right okay well I'll tell you what, I think erm people are coming to see me until about two or three or so but erm if you come a bit after three you'll probably catch me on my own
[speaker001:] Okay
[Brown:] Okay right cheers mhm
[speaker001:] Thank you Hello
[Brown:] Hello there, oh not too bad y'know erm... let's see, just done child sex abuse, or rather been talking about it
[speaker001:] an unpleasant subject
[Brown:] Yeah Yeah... right okay off we go. Okay see you soon... oh sorry. I just wish they'd stagger lecture finishing times because the corridors just get so totally packed Yeah mhm. Yes it's great, I mean in the first year lecture on Tuesday erm in the break I gave them in the middle of it the the corridor was like thick with tobacco smoke y'know you could hardly...
[speaker001:] got this really bad cough
[Brown:] Oh is that that slightly slightly older woman who's sort of middle aged?
[speaker001:] out in the corridor having a smoke
[Brown:] yeah
[speaker001:] stand it you know
[Brown:] yeah well um I don't know, maybe she grew up when there were y'know smoking was surrounded by rather different attitudes. Like my father, when he was, when my mother first started going with him he used to smoke cigarettes quite hea heavily erm and er when he had a cold or something like that he'd say, oh I must have a fag it helps me bring the phlegm up so erm in some ways they're almost perceived as having a like a cur curative er Hello? oh right. Now then mhm... erm sorry see see the difference of what?
[speaker001:] mhm right okay. So we're still erm we're still we're still live from the point of view of the British National Corpus I think. I dunno quite how erm er much er of other people's conversation it's picking up but it's probably picking me up er Can you record that all day?
[Brown:] Well I don't know. I think there's some instructions somewhere. Erm it says something along the lines of um, it doesn't say on there. I think there's some in I think I saw some instructions that ideally they were looking for about something like about four hours of lectures and about four hours of y'know kind of more tutorial like interactions. So erm y'know kind of I'll just er
[speaker001:] come and see me now
[Brown:] Well no I wasn't I wasn't thinking about that. I was just thinking about erm er y'know while it's while it's reasonably fresh in my mind. Um now one thing er I notice you're you've gone for quite heavily is using kind of declarative directional statements. That is, you know kind of where presumably the scale would be agree to disagree. Um and erm I was just wondering y'know kind of erm often when I write questionnaires I like to go for a sort of more kind of rather less declarative statements. Sort of, how do you feel about du du du du du du du y'know sort of yes definitely to no not all or y'know kind of doesn't bother me to very angry or something like that but given that you've done it this way, I think it works reasonably well. Now um
[speaker001:] Can you give me an example of of an alternative
[Brown:] Erm er I don't know, I mean maybe it would be like it would be like you give a fairly sort of neutral statement and you have the adjectives at the end of the scale give indicate the responses like y'know something like how do you feel about homosexuality and you could have sort of y'know erm natural to unnatural or something like that erm
[speaker001:] Oh yeah
[Brown:] yeah, as a possibility but given th give that you you've gone for it in this direction y'know kind of if you're happy I'm happy sort of thing. Um I was just thinking about y'know um yeah erm yeah it may be um given that you've er kind of er divided it up into into sections erm I think er maybe you could you could adopt a slightly different format for a different section or something like that so people y'know kind of get into section two and it's a wee bit different, it's a wee bit more er y'know
[speaker001:] y'know
[Brown:] I think I think it is a good idea though to erm oh right er to y'know kind of break it up a bit er particularly if at an early stage you're intending to y'know kind of go through erm and get people to go through quite a lot of questions erm as a by way of er y'know kind of the first stages in in er developing this thing. Um I think that um y'know it's often quite intimidating to be confronted with y'know sort of say eighty odd questions, if you were to use that many, erm so if you if you kind of break it up a bit in some way and have different headed sections with slightly different format questions it might y'know kind of help people through it as it were.
[speaker001:] Do you think there's too many there?
[Brown:] Erm I think um, given what you were saying yesterday, erm it's sometimes a good idea to start with quite a lot and then narrow it down a bit. Erm now I mean there's various things you can end up doing. One is erm like you were saying something like factor analysis, something like erm y'know kind of seeing how they cluster together. Erm on the basis of that you, and the other thing that er is probably worth thinking about is is looking at items which erm er sort of seem to distinguish strongly between people. If everybody fills a particular item in round about the middle or if everybody agrees with it or everybody disagrees with it, it's not telling you very much as it were, according to the usual of attitude scale construction anyway. I think sometimes they do tell you a lot but er y'know generally speaking they're like looking for items that strongly distinguish. The other thing is um, and you can spot this from correlation, matrixes and and factor analyses, erm if there's a lot of items that correlate quite highly together you can boot some of them out because they're not telling you anything that the other items don't already tell you sort of thing. So, you know, if you get one factor on which a lot of them load erm like the business about, you may find there're strong correlations between the attitudes to abnormality and, where's the one on mental illness and stuff like that? Erm so erm you may find that you can address that issue just as well with one erm and that's s well from what you were saying yesterday, that seems to be the y'know the kind of sort of approach to to design that you're taking. So maybe maybe keep it fairly big first of all and then then s on the basis of how people respond, narrow it down and maybe boot some out of that. Erm just thinking about
[speaker001:] If I do correlations I mean is that gonna be absolute massive job?
[Brown:] Erm it's a pretty it's a pretty big S P S S job actually erm if you've got that many. Erm you may have to um, thinking about the capabilities of that computer there, you may have to um er split it up into er into say two sets of questions. Erm because I think you can you can do a correlation matrix with say if you specify like forty odd variables. Erm it sometimes gets a bit, runs out of memory, if if you put very many more than that in. But the one on the in the public access machines over th in the main building they'll be able to do more because it's a more powerful computer it's based in. So erm so give it a go anyway and see what happens erm and it's no great hardship to have to y'know kind of do it in two or more sets I wouldn't have thought y'know it'll it'll probably still work. Erm so erm yeah as regards the selection of er of items I I didn't feel um er well for example generally speaking er I don't have any y'know sort of see any big problems with the wordings. They seem mostly fairly fairly direct and to relate fairly closely to everyday language so er y'know it's not gonna mhm yeah yeah yeah yeah Erm I was just thinking erm er there's quite a few field here. Erm it may be erm er worth, in that, in that context, saying something about erm to get a contrast effect between y'know sort of how people would feel if they saw a man and a woman kissing in public and they may be perfectly alright about that but they may er feel particularly disgusted when it's sort of two men or two women.
[speaker001:] I think these'd probably be better if I did them on the one you suggested for
[Brown:] yeah yeah maybe so yeah. Erm er what about the wor possibly a word like indifferent but it's not a very common word in the English language, possibly wouldn't be bothered or something like that. You can put a little phrase at the end of the scale or whatever scale you're intending to use
[speaker001:] Yeah. I think those'd probably be better with that kind of response rather than the previous one
[Brown:] Fair enough yeah because it just struck me that there's a lot of er a lot of disgusteds all at once there. Now did I think er anything when I've read these. Erm enjoy attending or offending?
[speaker001:] Attending?
[Brown:] Attending, oh right okay yeah. I could be offending I suppose. Erm yeah now these things these things could translate into sort of um
[speaker001:] comfortable uncomfortable
[Brown:] Yeah, comfortable uncomfortable um happy unhappy y'know kind of er Erm with some of these it may even be possible to y'know there's a number of different adjectives that you could try with with some of these things like erm y'know how would you feel about knowing that you're attractive to your own sex? Y'know sort of comfortable uncomfortable y'know kind of erm I don't know pleased displeased, angry, what's the opposite of angry? Erm y'know I mean because people have a whole variety of reactions to to these things which you may want to investigate more specifically. Er and it's one of these things where thinking about y your average heterosexual bloke they may respond angrily but there's a suspicion that maybe it's because they're feeling rather threatened underneath sort of thing. Erm y'know that that sort of thing when they when they y'know when they might be, when they feel when they feel that some some other bloke's making an approach to them, when they feel that er y'know erm somebody finds them attractive, when they think that some other bloke has made a pass at them or something like that y'know they sort of react in a hostile way but y'know there's that suspicion that mm er y'know kind of er it's because they're insecure about their masculinity, it's because they feel threatened or something like that. So there's a number of different dimensions to to these things which you may want to attack. Erm erm so er yeah. Well I suppose you're erm er addressing some of those different aspects as it is but again y'know in a sense I'm happy if you're happy but I'm just thinking of different ways of doing it
[speaker001:] I mean that idea about comfortable uncomfortable
[Brown:] Mhm yeah yeah so erm yeah there's a number of erm yeah. I wonder erm. One of the things that does strike me about er particularly heterosexual men and their attitudes to homosexual and y'know homo erotic activities, there's y'know a lot of different aspects where y'know I don't know rugby players all get in the shower together and smack each-other on the backside in the name of horse play and y'know it's not considered threatening or erm or outrageous and yet sometimes these are the very people who are the most homophobic. Erm there's a sense in which y'know kind of when I go to concerts erm there's y'know kind of there's loads of blokes who take their shirts off and er wrestle around together and build human pyramids and do all that kind of, lots of body contact, lots of grasping one-another and all that kind of thing and yet erm y'know presumably to them, on the assumption that they're heterosexual, as I assume probably they are, it's it's one of these things that erm y'know is kind of again maybe it even occurs at the same time as they're quite homophobic in some cases. Y'know that some kinds of activity are considered sort of acceptable and others aren't y'know. As soon as there's a a the merest hint of there's some sort of erotic intent then it's Mhm yeah and erm that kind of thing comes into it so that I was wondering if there's any way of er kind of y'know and what y'know where's that something about changing changing changing changing rooms somewhere?
[speaker001:] Here's one about the changing room
[Brown:] Yeah mm yeah so erm I was wondering if there's any way of er incorporating that. I think er, having said that, I mean you've got quite a decent coverage of attitudes and situations in here already. I'm just y'know just thinking about some of the things that occur to me. Erm so er yeah erm again y'know I don't have any particular c quarrels with the wordings or the the content of the items. Ah I think it's just erm y'know kind of erm type them out neatly and give them a go really erm
[speaker001:] What kind of people d'you think I the first year psychology students they've been given some sexual orientation? Not yet not yet Not yet?
[Brown:] Not yet, that comes a bit later in the term. I've got t I'm gonna do socialisation and er different approaches and
[speaker001:] use those then
[Brown:] Yeah I mean if you get erm, I'll tell you what actually, because it's a two hour slot I can in one slot get them to y'know and th we're not in a great hurry cos there's usually a few spaces left over at the end of the term. Erm y'know even if it takes them quite a while to fill out y'know go through all eighty items y'know which could be erm y'know kind of, well depending how quickly they work y'know, sort of half an hour or something but if you if you get some er er a sort of type-written draft run off um I dunno, next Tuesday's quite a quite a short deadline but maybe the Tuesday after that er we can try them on the first years if you like?
[speaker001:] Yeah that'd be great
[Brown:] Erm
[speaker001:] Now I've got er a little thing I wanted to ask as well about erm how people tend to label people as gay
[Brown:] Yeah
[speaker001:] I mean I tried it out at work I show you the this is what they used at work. It's probably too vague
[Brown:] Yeah
[speaker001:] in that um it was inspired by a comment that somebody made. They said about someone at work they said, he's we think he's gay
[Brown:] Mhm mhm
[speaker001:] but the trouble is, he doesn't know it yet
[Brown:] Oh right
[speaker001:] and when I gave them a questionnaire saying how would you label someone as gay they said, we never make those kind of assumptions. And I was thinking lying bastards
[Brown:] [LAUGHTER] mhm yeah
[speaker001:] so I'm thinking information out of somebody
[Brown:] mhm yeah erm mhm yeah well I think I think it's one of these things like a lot of er mhm yeah yeah. Yeah erm yeah Yeah erm. I think there's all sorts of er there's all sorts of things that people do and they work at different levels. I mean it's almost like as as part of y'know kind of the general the general gossip of everyday life. Oh I think he's a bit camp isn't he? Y'know kind of kind of comments or playful thoughts you might pass about somebody but you you try not to do it seriously as it were, you try not to let it affect your behaviour towards them, you try to not be surprised if they disclose they're gay or heterosexual or whatever so er
[speaker001:] I suppose what I did there was put them on the spot so how could I word that so that it doesn't put people on the defensive so much?
[Brown:] mhm yeah yeah yeah mhm I don't know. I think it's more erm if it's it's difficult to know exactly because people shift into different repertoires. The sort of stuff that you get in in y'know sort of everyday gossip between friends about y'know when people talk about each- other, oh I think he's a bit er I think he's a bit camp, or I think he probably is but erm yeah yeah all that kind of thing yeah erm is is like the the informal repertoire, the informal repertoire that you do between friends erm, between people to whom it sort of y'know it's not very important if you give them the wrong impression sort of thing. Erm whereas kind of in in a situation like this, people lapse into the formal repertoire. Let's not make assumptions, let's y'know it's up to them and y'know kind of er we shouldn't intrude into their private lives, that's their personal decision and er shouldn't make assumptions about other people's sexuality and all that kind of thing comes out. Erm so I think I think that's a very difficult thing to access. Erm, particularly erm if you if you if you're working with people who've got the as it were the politically correct repertoire er that that yeah alright mhm yeah mhm yeah yeah mhm yeah [LAUGHTER] yeah mhm I know but mhm yeah yeah
[speaker001:] See some of them have them with that. I mean some people were quite willing to answer it and they were quite willing to say what stereotypes they usually employ and others j er just clam up and said, oh I never judge people, and I thought yeah liar doing all the time? biggest gossips in the office and she's never got a good word to say about anyone, she's always digging the dirt but when I presented her with it, I never try to judge people. I'm thinking I can't believe you're saying this but I wanted to photocopy it and show it everyone you see
[Brown:] Mhm well perhaps she doesn't perceive what she does as as judging people y'know perhaps she just