Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Sexual Assault and Trauma: Psychiatry and the Feminist “Victim-Survivor Discourse”

Abstract

  This paper reviews the victim and survivor discourses on sexual assault that have developed since the late 1960s, mainly in anglophone countries. Recently, research, especially in psychiatry and psychology, focusing on the subjectivity of women who have experienced sexual assault, is flourishing in Japan. However, while technical theories such as the development of psychotherapy and clinical research have seemed acceptable in this context, the discussions by feminist researchers on gender issues have not yet achieved this status. Therefore, this paper investigates the debates among feminist scholars that have developed mainly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Philosophers and sociologists, in collaboration sometimes with psychologists, considered the merits and demerits of psychiatric discourses on sexual assault and the resulting trauma. Specifically, the author will examine how the victim discourse, which emphasizes passivity as a sick person suffering from trauma, and the survivor discourse, which emphasizes autonomy and coping actively with trauma, have developed since the late 1960s. This examination reveals how feminist scholarship seemingly devalues medical interventions and attempts to illuminate the people excluded from them. This paper concludes this review will provide clues for rethinking care for those who have experienced sexual assault in Japan beyond a mere critique of medicalization.