‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry’ is a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded interdisciplinary project led by Professor Joanna Bourke.
The project aims to promote human health through providing unprecedented insights into the role of medicine and psychiatry in understanding, interpreting, treating, prosecuting, and preventing sexual violence.
The team is currently comprised of 7 members: 1 Principal Investigator, 1 Public Engagement & Events Coordinator, 1 Post-doc, 1 PhD candidate, 1 affiliated Senior Research Fellow, 1 Affiliated PhD candidate, and 1 filmmaker.
We are also working with a distinguished international Advisory Board, who will contribute to the formulation of our research strategy, review and analyse our findings throughout the project, and contribute to the development of our dissemination strategy, as well as provide a crucial global context to our research.
Over the course of the 5-year project, the team will organise a range of academic and public-facing conferences and workshops, including a witness seminar, alongside producing policy reports and a range of academic outputs. We are in the process of commissioning a project website that will feature updates on our research, selected archival material, podcasts, and news about our events.
Watch this space!
The team:
Prof Joanna Bourke (PI):
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck and the Principal Investigator on the ‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry’ project. She leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers to investigate the changing relationship between medicine, psychiatry and sexual violence in a global context.
The project places medical professionals at the heart of debates about sexual violence as they have been increasingly influential agents in the understanding, interpretation, medicalisation, and adjudication of sexual attacks. The research focuses on the period between the first decade of the nineteenth century, when forensic medicine became a separate discipline, and the present. This is an important time to investigate the relationship between medical professionals and sexual violence: scandals around medical and psychiatric responses to sexual abuse emerge on a regular basis. There have been major concerns about the role of medical professionals in the courts, the abuse of patients in psychiatric wards, failures to send the biological samples from ‘rape kits’ for forensic examination, complaints about medical examinations, and popular anxieties about the treatment and rehabilitation of violent offenders. This project will therefore be a powerful example of how historical scholarship can inform contemporary debates.
Joanna will write two books based on the project’s research: one on the relationship of sexual violence to medicine and psychiatry in Britain, America, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the other, a global history of sexual violence.
Dr Ruth Beecher (post-doc):
Ruth Beecher completed her PhD at Birkbeck in 2015 and joins the project as a post-doctoral researcher. Her project, ‘Signals and Signs: Children, Medics and Child Sexual Abuse’ explores how nurses, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists have responded to (or ignored) child sexual abuse within the family since the 1960s in the UK and the US. By asking how their thoughts, behaviours, public utterances, and clinical practices have changed over time, Ruth’s aim is to bring a historical perspective to a problem that is often seen only in a particular cultural moment. Her methodology combines archival research with the collection of oral histories from current and retired community health practitioners.
Adeline Moussion (PhD):
Adeline Moussion joins the project as a PhD candidate with a project entitled ‘Sexual Violence, Subject Violation, Incorporated Domination. An Ethnography of the Construction of Rape Experiences among French Feminist Organisations Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence’. Working with feminist organisations in Paris, Adeline’s research asks how definitions of unwanted sexual activities shift from unwanted to unbearable at the individual level; what the impacts are of a political response that frames sexual violence as a social or health issue; and how ‘rape’ is distinguished from normalised constraint sexual activities.
Dr Louise Hide (Affiliated Senior Research Fellow):
Louise Hide is a social and cultural historian of psychiatry and its institutions and joins the project as an affiliated researcher. Her research project, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: Cultures of Harm in Residential Institutions for Long-Term Adult Care, Britain 1945-1980s’ is funded by a three-year Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Medical Humanities. Using records from inquiries held during the 1970s into abuse in two long-stay psychiatric and ‘mental handicap’ hospitals, Louise’s research interrogates the prevailing belief systems, attitudes and practices that gave rise to and perpetuated abusive behaviours in these institutional contexts.
Caitlin Cunningham (Affiliated PhD Candidate):
Caitlin Cunningham is a third-year doctoral candidate supervised by Joanna Bourke and joins the project as an affiliated researcher. Her project, ‘The Utmost Resistance: Rape and Sexual Power in California, 1849-1910’ explores the intricacies of sexual power in a period of social instability, institutional formation, and self-conscious imperial nation-building, and how they help to explain some of the complex ways that individuals were ordered and understood according to gendered and racialized notions of personhood. Her research argues that sex and sexuality were not only indelible features of American westward expansion, but were integral to inventing, justifying, and maintaining certain colonial orders.
James Gray (filmmaker):
James Gray joins the project as a filmmaker and will help the team to produce two documentary films that will be hosted at Birkbeck Cinema. James has extensive experience in testimony-driven programming, with particular experience of dealing with sensitive subject matter and working with vulnerable contributors. He has made documentaries for all major UK broadcasters, as well as several major US channels, and has previously worked with Joanna to produce a 60-minute BBC4 documentary.
Rhea Sookdeosingh (Public Engagement & Events Coordinator):
Rhea Sookdeosingh joins the project as the Public Engagement & Events Coordinator. The project is committed to producing research that is responsive and accessible to non-academic audiences and stakeholders, and Rhea’s role involves developing a public engagement strategy informed by the team’s engaged research practices, as well as supporting researchers to develop a suite of programming that ensures their research has tangible and practical benefits beyond academia. She has previously worked in public engagement as Birkbeck’s first Public Engagement Intern, with responsibility for organising the College’s inaugural Public Engagement Awards. Prior to this she worked within the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford, where she was responsible for running an interdisciplinary graduate funding scheme and organising the annual Public Engagement with Research Summer School. Alongside her work on the project, Rhea is completing a PhD at Oxford on the history of anorexia nervosa in nineteenth-century Britain.
