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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on a coproduced project into experiences of online facilitated child sexual abuse. This project produced a survivor-led zine, artworks, and animations as well as collaborative findings. It also explores the entanglements of lived-experience expertise with epistemic flattening.
Paper long abstract:
'Virtual abuse, infinite harm: A coproduced study with survivors of online child sexual abuse'
Trauma caused through online-facilitated abuse and exploitation challenges assumptions of online lives and understandings of trauma itself. Drawing on the expertise and insights of twenty-one adults who experienced online-facilitated child sexual abuse (OFCSA), we identified the centrality of control in traumatic events and the real and lasting harms caused by online sexual abuse. It contributes to understandings of the online in contemporary lives, showing the entwinement of the virtual with the actual. Our research identified key findings across experiences of online child abuse, and developed creative outputs including artworks, a zine, and animations. We embedded trauma-informed and survivor-focused research insights into our research practice, and throughout the project, we were committed to the quality of participants engagement being as important as the findings and outputs. This talk will reflect on our creative and coproduced methodologies and reconsider the concept of trauma through the lens of OFCSA.
This talk will also explore the knottiness of trauma with epistemologies of testimony and witnessing. While trauma can constitute an existential divide between those who have lived experiences of trauma (and within these, those who have a particular type of experience - for example, online as opposed to 'contact'), at the same time survivors experience epistemic 'flattening.' This flattening emerges as a hyphenation of knowledge through which their expertise as trauma survivors inflects their contributions as 'survivor-artists,' 'survivor-participants,' and 'person with lived experience.'
Collaboration, co-authorship, and co-production: research participants as co-constructors of ethnographic knowledge and outputs