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'History Investigators': An Interactive Workshop on the History of Resistance to Sexual Violence at the Shameless! Festival
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‘History Investigators’: An Interactive Workshop on the History of Resistance to Sexual Violence at the Shameless! Festival

Dr Ruth Beecher overviews her workshop, History Investigators, from the Shameless! Festival. The interactive session asked festival goers to delve into fact, myth, folklore and personal histories to build a timeline of resistance to sexual violence.

Shameless! Festival1111
Ruth Beecher 7 January 2022
Shameless! Festival

‘History Investigators’: An Interactive Workshop on the History of Resistance to Sexual Violence at the Shameless! Festival

On Saturday 28 Nov, the SHaME team and WOW hosted the Shameless! Festival at Battersea Arts Centre in south London. With an amazing and diverse turnout of people, ideas and opinions flew about throughout the day. The only disappointment was that we couldn’t all be in two or three spaces at once.

The SHaME team ran a range of activities including ‘History Investigators,’ an interactive workshop where festival goers delved into fact, myth, folklore and personal histories to build a timeline of resistance to sexual violence.

Historians Ruth Beecher (@deltacane) and Allison McKibban (@AllisonMckibban) were on hand as people sorted through images from primary sources from the nineteenth century right up to 2020: photographs, newspaper articles, court records, book covers and more. Each artifact was a reminder of an act of resistance against sexual violence – some well-known, others less so. Attendees then had to place the event on a timeline, bringing to bear lots of knowledge, some intrepid detective work and some inspired guesswork!

Participants talked about what and who they thought was most important in the fight to create a rape free world and to change attitudes to sexual assault and harassment. Feminists, doctors, ‘ordinary people,’ lawyers, the media, and academics were in the mix and participants talked about the ways race and ethnicity, age, class, gender and disability played in visibility of sexual assault and in the struggles to make positive changes.

Often and for understandable reasons, academic research and popular depictions of sexual violence focus on the harm caused by cultures of violence. The History Investigators Workshop was intriguing and uplifting as attendees explored the peaks and troughs of resistance and the inspirational strength of resistance from survivors and their allies across the globe.

We hope to build a digital timeline on our website so watch this space!

 

Dr Ruth Beecher is a postdoctoral research fellow on the SHaME project. She is a social and cultural historian with interests in the history of race, gender, children and families, and popular culture in the US and UK in the twentieth century. Read more about her research here.

 

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Further Reading

Child Sexual Abuse in the Family by Dr Ruth Beecher — (Un)Silenced: Institutional Sexual Violence

05 Jun 202305 Jun 2023
Ruth Beecher
Commentary
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Is the family a place of safety or a trap? SHaME Director Dr Ruth Beecher explores the institution of the family and the (lack of) recognition of child sexual abuse within it.

Hearing Male Survivors by Dr George Severs — (Un)Silenced: Institutional Sexual Violence

15 May 202315 May 2023
George Severs
Commentary
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Dr George Severs argues that the history of male victims of rape and sexual violence should make us all alert to the ways in which gender norms silence male experiences of abuse, and prompt us to hear hear male survivors who are so often both silent and silenced.

Involuntary Sterilization by Allison McKibban — (Un)Silenced: Institutional Sexual Violence

12 May 202312 May 2023
Allison McKibban
Commentary
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Can medical institutions participate in colonial violence? SHaME's Allison McKibban argues the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of Native American women in the 1970s must be rehistoricised as part of the U.S. government’s broader campaign of genocide.
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