ABSTRACT
When confronted with untellable narratives, it is a natural reaction to appropriate, reinterpret or re-categorise, as Shuman (2005) argues. Another common reaction is to render certain categories of storytelling unrecognisable. People will think that, in a civilised society like Hong Kong, people do not abuse their helpers and therefore, they happily consent with public opinion that this kind of thing does not happen. Or, stories about FDH abuse become taboo; they are stories that people know about but do not want to be reminded of. Either way, trauma storytelling is compromised. Because these events should not happen in a civilised society, we have to either pretend they didn’t or somehow discredit the teller by claiming, for example, that FDHs’ narratives about abuse are untruthful or grossly exaggerated. Or, the storyteller needs to be discredited by claiming that there is something inherently wrong with her group as an aggregate. As Hanson-Easey and Augoustinos (2012, p. 50) argue, prejudice about marginalised outgroups is not created in a social vacuum, but taps into pre-existing fears and ideological common-sense notions, and essentially provides majority group members with ‘permission’ to discriminate against certain minority groups.
