ABSTRACT
This chapter is about some of the research issues and difficulties I faced in my PhD thesis, where a central concern was to how I represent respondents’ stories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) within my research. These stories were drawn from a sample of over a thousand letters written in a response to an appeal made by the National Commission of Inquiry into the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCIPCA).1 When defining the contents of the letters I have used Plummer’s view of ‘a personal experience narrative…[which] overlaps with, but is not quite the same as a life story, a biography, a self story’ (1995:15). Plummer focuses on one sub-genre: stories of suffering, surviving and surpassing, and this best illustrates the stories told within the letters. For instance, some of the letters may only cover one aspect, such as describing the effects of the abuse on the writer’s life, other letters tell how the writer is coping with having been abused, while other writers may talk of all three: their suffering, how they survived and how they surpassed CSA.
