Paper short abstract:

This autoethnography of a violent assault in 1980s Belfast and its aftermath focuses on the variable responses of justice systems (official and unofficial), and subsequent reticence in scholarly and professional contexts.

Paper long abstract:

The assault took place while the author was living in a housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast. In the aftermath, the author was confronted with a choice between official and unofficial (paramilitary) justice systems. He chose the former. The paper describes the consequences of this choice, the concepts of trauma then deployed in the assessment of compensation: an emphasis on physical injury and ‘blood money’ not emotional support.

The author was writing-up his PhD in anthropology at the time of the assault. It did not occur to him to inform his PhD committee, perhaps because the incident did not occur while he was doing fieldwork, but when he was literally at home. This conference would be first time he has discussed this incident at an academic conference of anthropologists. The paper considers reasons for this reticence, comparing his experience to that of other local scholars who experienced violence close-up.

After the ceasefires in 1994, and more so after the peace agreement in 1998, a grassroots movement of storytelling has flourished in Northern Ireland. But in the 1980s when this incident occurred the local norm was to make light of injury. Amongst local scholars, this stoicism seems to have persisted.