the restless punk songs: the long conversation

Song: The Long Conversation

For Restless, I’ve been researching 50+ years of CSA survivor activism. The Long Conversation is my way of sharing some of this history and paying tribute to Louise Armstrong - the first survivor to speak out publicly about incest in the US. She placed an ad in a national paper asking survivors to share their experiences and published a collection of these testimonies in Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak Out On Incest in 1978. In the following years more and more people spoke out, more books were published, more survivors organised against abuse and there was growing awareness in the media and wider culture. Sandra Butler published The Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma Of Incest also in 1978. In 1980, Florence Rush wrote the devastating The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children tracing the religious, historical and cultural embeddedness of child sexual abuse and calling out the Freudian Cover-Up. In 1988, The Courage to Heal was published - a seminal self-help guide for survivors written by Ellen Bass and survivor Laura Davis.
 
At the same time, there was a massive growth in psychiatry, the wider therapy industry and the practice of diagnosis. The primary cultural response to survivors speaking out was to label and medicate. Notably, both Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder first appeared in the DSM-III in 1980. Louise Armstrong and her peers saw this as a backlash by patriarchal culture to pathologise and silence victims. This backlash came to a head in 1992 with the advent of “False Memory Syndrome” (I’ll write about this elsewhere).

In 1994, Louise Armstrong wrote Rocking The Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest. It is a brilliant and scathing commentary - you can feel her rage as you read it. Reflecting on the early speak outs she says “it was not our intention merely to start a long conversation”. This is my new favourite quote. Talking about abuse isn’t enough, we need to see change.
 
Reading this history is a different way of reflecting on my own lived experience, which is not just of surviving child sex abuse but also of surviving a culture that others, silences and ignores us. I am so grateful to these pioneering women and so many others who, as part of the second wave of feminism, broke the silence. I never heard the words “child sex abuse” until I was around 20 (in 1991) - I didn’t remember my own abuse until I was 29. It’s because of these women that I did, that I had language and frameworks to start to understand my own experiences and a political framework to understand survivor oppression. I am very much standing on their shoulders - all of us agitating for change now are standing on these shoulders. It’s important to remember that - like every other bit of our collective history we need to make sure it is not forgotten.
 
Louise Armstrong died in 2008 but you can listen to her speech from the 1996 Brighton International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship here. I am getting to meet and work alongside women who knew her then who tell me my song conjures her, vividly, which obviously means the world.

Hear 'The Long Conversation' and the other Restless songs at our work-in-progress sharing on 11th July at Morley College in London:

Restless // A one-hour punk theatre gig
Wednesday, 11th July
Doors 7pm. Gig 7.30-8.30pm. Venue closes 9pm
Morley College, Lambeth North, London
This is a Work in Progress Sharing. It is a supportive event about testing new work.
Age 18+

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