ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the issues of past and present agency in relation to recollections of child sexual abuse (CSA). It considers how materiality is part of the very fabric of memories, in terms of establishing agency and in deciphering responsibility and blame. Central to this analysis are questions relating to the positioning of agency and its associated ambivalence within these accounts. Emphasising past passivity can create a narrative framework that constitutes the adult survivor as similarly lacking in agency, a victim rather than an actor in their own unfolding life experience. Janice Haaken has spoken in some detail of the kinds of problems that may emerge when survivors simplify experiences of abuse to literalist adult interpretations of childhood powerlessness. The chapter describes about the survivors' recollections that is danger in ignoring the profound ambivalence that emerges when one attempts to fold adult life-space around the space of the childhood experience.
