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FKA Twigs is brave & brilliant for going public about her abuser LaBoeuf. But articles like these where journalists lead with & lean on traumatic details of what happened are often re-traumatising for survivors & can leave audiences in an unhelpful place. https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a35460385/fka-twigs-shia-la-beouf-abuse/
This is not to say that this article will not resonate with people. Or that FKA Twigs or anyone who speaks out is wrong to do so. It's not my place to say this & it's not true. We need people to speak out to create the space we desperately need to change things for the better.
But I think it's important to look at how the classic interview-with-a-survivor structure is working. What impact does it have on audiences - and the survivor who is driven by a desire to affect change by sharing their experiences?
The assumption is that by sharing details of what happened, whatever the issue, people will sit up, feel horrified & take action. Research shows us that this is not what happens. Audiences often feel fatalistic, assume it's a one off, it won't happen to me & "bad things happen".
In our @Angles_project work, survivors who do media work tell us of the burden of responsibility they feel to tell their stories publicly to create change, the regretful hangover they often feel afterwards for over sharing or not saying the right thing. They are re-traumatised.
Survivors (same thing applies to anyone with lived experience of issues they're addressing) have come to expect that in order to have impact, they must go public with intimate details of their story. They must answer the journalist's q "what happened?" as powerfully as possible.
And the thing is, we (journalists & campaigning orgs) often put survivors in this position because we all share the common goal of changing things for the better. We all want people to sit up, push for policy change and changes in cultural norms.
But if we don't move the conversation to the structural issues at play from the outset - and it is possible to support survivors to do this very powerfully - we are leaving audiences feeling either hopeless or eager to dismiss the story as an outlier.
To get there, we need to talk about this. We need to collaborate with journalists to move the conversation away from the details of, in this case, an easily dismissible troubled Hollywood actor, to the place where we can both imagine and demand change.
We need to work with the incredible people who are doing the heavy lifting of speaking out so that they know they don't have to continuously mine the details of their stories to open our eyes to what's happening all around us, and how all of us have a powerful part to play.
If you’re a survivor and you want free support, training and to join a network of survivor-campaigners doing media work, please see how we can support you here https://www.angles.org.uk/for-activists/
