Making Abuse Visible Through Words

Language can expose or conceal abuse. It is not an impartial medium.

Language makes our insides visible. It exposes our hidden experiences, thoughts and feelings.

There is physical visibility through our bodies, voices, physicality, mannerisms and gait. But what’s going on the inside is only expressed through words. Our beliefs, feelings, thoughts, experiences and dreams are transferred to another through language.

But have you ever thought about your language? Have you ever thought about where it comes from and how it is formed?

We take language for granted and presume that it is an impartial medium. Its vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar are just facts. But just like everything, they are socially constructed and when something is formed it is influenced by power.

Language is influenced by power

Language provides us with a map of experiences that can be spoken about and described through available vocabulary. It gives us the ability to refer to shared meaning so that I can communicate my experience with others. But who or what gets to determine the words that represent our experiences?

Feminist researchers since the 1970s and ’80s have been discussing how patriarchal power has influenced the development of the English language. They do not say that it was insidious or deliberate. However, the socialisation of men and women within a patriarchal society promoted men to make the rules about language and form it based on their experience. To provide some examples of the impact of this:

Women’s experiences were not named. Phrases such as sexual harassment or domestic violence were not coined until the 1960s or 70s. It is not to say that these experiences didn’t exist before this time because it certainly did but without a name, there is no shared meaning between experiences. How are you meant to talk about what was happening to you to your friends or family if there was no name? How are you meant to mobilise against something nameless?
Words to describe women are more often negative and sexual. Even words that describe the same state in a man as a woman like ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ — the female one is negative and the male is positive. There are many words to describe a woman who has slept with ‘too many people’, think of slut, whore but no word that describes the same state in a man.

All of this is to say that language is a social construct and reflects power. If language is what we use to express and expose our feelings and life experiences, are there elements that are concealed by language, especially as a woman or other historically disempowered group?

Abuse made visible

We still grapple with using a language forged in the patriarchal furnace to express and make visible what is on the inside.

Grace Tame is an Australian public figure who has risen to prominence in her campaign against child sexual abuse. I have written several articles about Tame recently because I find her extremely inspirational and I think she should be known internationally. Her influence on Australian politics in 2021 and arguably on the future of sexual assault services, legal reform, awareness and comfortability about coming forward will continue. Amongst all of this, she is one of the most visible people I have seen.

You might think I mean visible in a physical or celebrity sense, or even a political sense. I mean in a language sense. Her life and her experiences are the most visible I have come across in the words she speaks. Tame campaigns for the use of clear and accurate language when talking about sexual and domestic violence. Often language is used to soften the abuse or shift blame from the perpetrator. So she endeavours to use the clearest and most explicit means of expressing what Nicolaas Bester did to her.

At times, I must say this is jarring. In listening or reading interviews with Tame, to hear someone speak so directly about what Nicolaas Bester did to her is confronting. Can you see there how I have hidden what happened? I have said what ‘he did to her’ instead of ‘how Nicolaas Bester raped her when she was 15 years old.’

Tame says to take the uncomfortableness we feel about talking about abuse and place it at the feet of the perpetrator instead of the hearts and minds of victims. Abuse is made visible through accurate words.

Misrepresenting abuse

Scholars have studied ways in which language can conceal violence, mitigate the responsibility of the perpetrator and blame a victim. It isn’t just the use of certain words or phrases such as ‘what was she wearing?’ It is in the very structure of a sentence or whether a verb or noun is chosen. Here are some common ones that are raised in the research:

Passive voice – a sentence that is structured Object-verb-Agent instead of an active sentence which is agent-verb-object. For example – ‘he hit her’ (active sentence) compared to ‘she was hit’ (passive). Passive voice is used to describe sexual violence more often than other crimes in the news (Northcutt Bohmert et al 2018). Also when comparing male-perpetrated to female-perpetrated violence, passive voice was more often used (Frazer and Miller 2008)
Nominalisation – changing a verb to a noun. It is when the action becomes a ‘thing’ that is referred to without saying who did it. For example, ‘violence against women’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘abuse’. This means we can talk at length about abuse and violence without ever referring to who did it. In a sentence this looks like, ‘Domestic violence leads to the murder of one woman a week in Australia.’
Mutualisation – words that are by definition mutual acts, used to describe abusive acts. For example, Grace Tame campaigned to change the legal definition of sexual abuse of a child from ‘maintaining a sexual relationship’ to ‘persistent sexual abuse of a child’. The use of the word ‘relationship’ implies there is a mutuality about it and can allow abuse to be characterised as romance. The use of this language was found to reduce the responsibility and blame placed on the perpetrator significantly and change the recommended punishment (Lamb 1991).

So where does this leave us?

Feminists in the 1970s-80s thought this all meant that women needed to make a new language. There were feminist dictionaries written with definitions that reflected women’s experiences. This was a simple way of looking at language though. Where one group dominates its creation but we know that language is more nuanced then that. There is a push and pull about words and grammar. One can just reflect on how language has changed structure and form with the invention of technology and see that it is not one mythic group pulling the strings. But we must also be aware that language is not a neutral medium. It is influenced by patriarchal power as well as other oppressive powers such as racism, ableism, and homophobia. These powers sit outside individuals and socialise everyone.

So when language is used to talk about abuse in any form, whether it be you, your friend, public figures, policy documents, take note of the language that is being used.

Is it softened or downplayed to conceal violence?
Is it mutualised to imply both people are responsible?
Is the cause or perpetrator even identified?