Talking About Sexual Assault with Adults: What Can We Learn From YAL? by Stacia L. Long

I grow old...I grow old.../I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.    The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliothe

One of the things I love about going to conferences is the chance to hear from graduate students. I love their energy and their plans for the future of education. I have been working in education for 41 years. I can see the end creepying towards me. Okay, some days it feels like it is flying towards me. The ideas and research of graduate students is rejuvenating. 

I meet Stacia about a year ago, but at the ELATE conference last July I had the chance to hear her talk about her research project. It was fantastic. I loved what she was doing. I am waiting for her to finish her dissertation so I can read all aboutof her project. I knew right away there was a blog post in what she was presenting. When she was done, I told her so. She asked a few questions, we set us a date, and here we are. 

Oh, there is one more important thing, Stacia is working on her Ph.D at my Alma Mater, The University of Georgia--Go Dawgs!.

​Take it away Stacia.

Talking About Sexual Assault with Adults: What Can We Learn From YAL?
by Stacia L. Long

I’m interested in how teachers respond when they learn that their students have been arrested for sexual violence. As the #MeToo movement experienced its resurgence[1], I came across many YAL books that explored young people’s experiences with sexual violence. Book lists are circulating on blogs, in popular press publications for young readers, and in mainstream news outlets. Many readers of these lists and the books featured on them have been motivated to learn more about what is happening in the news and how YAL books reflect the world.

​My conversations with teachers who used YAL to discuss issues of consent, sexual violence, and current events included questions about how teachers and other concerned adults were being portrayed in YAL that featured such assaults. When I read the novels with this thought in mind, I was both inspired and disheartened by their characterizations. My initial identification and also discomfort led me to think more deeply about characterizations of adults and their relationships with young adult characters in novels centered on sexual assault. 

Representations of Adults in YAL

Much of the YAL scholarship that focuses on sexual violence, along with other controversial topics, emphasizes its benefits for students. Teachers, according to many sources, should have these books in their classroom libraries and incorporate these stories into their literacy instruction. Yet adults, like student readers, have much to learn from these books.
 
Hadley (2018) pointed out that “one of the common plot devices in YA literature has been absent parents” (p. 24) or other adults. However, although they are often absent in YAL, adults who appear in the stories are “important in young adults’ lives no matter what presence they might have” (Gimalva, 2015, p. 1). Adults such as parents, teachers, coaches, and religious figures circulate through these books in remarkably interesting ways (Niemi, Smith, & Brown, 2014). They are present, yet also absent, at times even when present.

I am interested, along with my colleague Chea Parton, in exploring the ways that relationships between adults and adolescent characters are represented in YAL about sexual violence. YAL often reflects adolescent issues that fly beneath the radar of adult vision, such as sexual experiences, including assault. When adults read this fiction, then, they may gain insight into what young people experience and how it affects them socially and psychologically (Lewis, Petrone, & Sarigianides, 2016; Niemi, Smith, & Brown, 2014). 

[1] According to Wikipedia, Black social activist and community organizer Tarana Burke “began using the phrase ‘Me Too’ in 2006, on the Myspace social network in order to promote ‘empowerment through empathy’ among women of color who have been sexually abused. Burke, who is creating a documentary titled Me Too, has said she was inspired to use the phrase after being unable to respond to a 13-year-old girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke said she later wished she had simply told the girl: ‘Me too’. The Me Too movement of Ms. Burke was different at least in its scale from the Me Too movement of Alyssa Milano,” a White actress who revived the phrase following the 2017 revelations about Harvey Weinstein.

Examples of Adults in #MeToo YAL

​Hadley (2018) argues that YAL often positions adults as peripheral or even harmful characters in the lives of young adults. These stories can have real effects on the way that readers think about relationships between teenagers and adults. I have paid special attention to these relationships when the fiction includes a sexual assault.
 
Four #MeToo-era novels I’ve come across include first-person narrations from the perspective of a victim of sexual assault: The Way I Used to Be by Amber Smith (2016), Asking for It by Louise O’Neill (2016), Exit, Pursued by a Bear E. K. Johnston (2017), and Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali (2017). Three out of these four novels feature White middle-class girls, characteristic of the genre even as it has begun to expand to include other intersectional identities. Two of the four have been discussed in YA Wednesday blog posts by Margaret Robbins, and by Luke Rodesiler and Mark A. Lewis, focusing on different aspects of the novels such as diet culture and sports in YAL. In the following summaries, I emphasize the roles of adults in how the characters experience and attempt to recover from the assaults.

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Often compared with Anderson’s (1999) Speak because the novel is built around the protagonist’s struggle to find the courage to report her rape, Smith’s (2016) The Way I Used to Be spans Eden’s four years of high school. As the book progresses through her high school years, Eden tries to recover physically, emotionally, and psychologically from being sexually assaulted in her bedroom by her brother’s best friend. Her coping mechanisms involve self-destructive behavior as she does drugs, pushes away friends and family, and engages in sex with boys she doesn’t feel emotionally connected to. Throughout the book, the adult characters seem to Eden to be too unapproachable to talk with about rape. This distance severs her connection with her parents, creating the presence of absence of this critical relationship. She doesn’t talk about the assault until a detective begins investigating another rape by Eden’s attacker. But the book’s conclusion finds her still alienated from her parents.

In Asking for It (O’Neill, 2016), Emma—an unsympathetic character to begin with—is sexually assaulted by a group of boys at a party after she has been drinking and drugged. The assault is photographed and later goes viral when posted on social media. Emma suffers bullying and social ostracism as she struggles to return to school and normal life in the aftermath of the sexual assault. She has to endure cyberbullying in the form of posting and commenting on the photos, and hostile national media coverage of the sexual assault and social media posts. Rather than serving as supporters during this trying time, the adult characters in this book are often seen going through the motions of responding to Emma’s sexual assault. They file reports, provide her with a defense, take her to therapy, and offer other types of pro forma assistance that is not motivated by genuine care.  Or worse, they add to the critical, harmful, and judgmental evaluation of her character that is a part of the local and national conversation about her assault. Few characters emerge from the novel’s conclusion as sympathetic or admirable.

​Exit, Pursued by a Bear is described by Moore (2018) as an “almost fantastical depiction of allyship” for Hermione Winters, a high school cheerleader in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted at cheer summer camp. What makes this novel stand out from the other two is the powerful support from most of the characters in the book, both high school students and adults. Hermione’s first conversation about the sexual assault happens with the nurse and her best friend upon regaining consciousness. This conversation takes place in a sterile, medical institution with an adult who is a stranger, yet is conducted with compassion and support. Like this first conversation, all the adults who care for Hermione in the aftermath of the rape let her take the lead in determining what she needs to heal and seek justice. This book provides a rare depiction of adults serving in caring, empathetic roles with an assault teen victim needing their support. 

Saints and Misfits (Ali, 2017) is the exception to the genre’s emphasis on White characters in this sample. Janna is sexually harassed by a boy who is related to her best friend and regarded as a young leader in her mosque. Following the assault she refers to him as “the monster.” She actively avoids him at all costs and is too frightened to tell anyone about the traumatic encounter. She thinks multiple times about telling her uncle, the Imam of her mosque, whom she views as a supportive adult, because of the boy’s leadership role in the services. Janna fears the social repercussions of revealing her experience without concrete evidence, but after talking with her friends and sending her uncle a veiled and anonymous email asking for advice, she reports her harassment. Although Janna is fearful of the repercussions of coming forward about the monster’s sexual harassment, the adults in her lives, beginning with the Imam, exceed her expectations for care, compassion, and understanding. 

While reading these books and others in this genre, I thought about a number of questions that help me unpack the relationships between adults and young victims of sexual assaults in YAL. These issues are both of literary and pedagogical concern, and affect how the novels portray events that can help readers anticipate how they would act in the event of a sexual assault, or reflect on and make sense of their own experiences with rape.
 
Readers of these texts and others that center sexual assault could consider these questions, posed from a variety of perspectives:

Narrative Structure

• When and how do readers learn about the sexual assault or sexual violence in the book?
• With whom do characters share their sexual assaults? How, where, and why does this conversation unfold?

Adult Roles and Relationships

• How is the character cared for and supported by adults before and after revealing the sexual assault?
• What kinds of adults are in the story? What roles do they have and what are their relationships like with the protagonist? 
• How are the relationships between adults and high school students constructed in trauma-centered scenes where sexual assault is essential to the plot? What words are used? How do bodies move throughout the space? What are the consequences or outcomes?
• How are high school characters supported at the time they give their testimonies and seek action and healing?
• What values are demonstrated throughout the interactions between adults and high school characters around sexual assault?

Extrapolating to Lived Experience

• How might you respond instructionally and relationally to the protagonist in these novels, if you were their teacher?
• How would you suggest to students that they approach the topic of sexual assault with adults?
• How might you open conversations with other teachers and administrators about the issues raised in the novels, and help the school address sexual assault in ways that ensure the safety of victims?

Whether the readers of these texts are adults or young adults, it is important to remember that these books are representations of possibilities for how these critical conversations might unfold. The books I’ve highlighted and others like them offer the opportunity to think carefully and critically about the kinds of relationships that students have with the adults in their lives at home, at school, and in all the different spaces and places in their lives. 

Additional Books

Fiction

1. Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero
2. All the Rage by Courtney Summers
3. Rani Patel in Full Effect by Sonia Patel
4. What We Saw by Aaron Harzler
5. Push by Sapphire
6. Fault Line by Christa Desir
7. The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan
8. Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough
9. Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin
10. Every Last Promise by Kristen Halbrook 

Nonfiction   

1. Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson
2. I Have the Right To: A High School Survior’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope by Chessy Prout with Jenn Abelson
3.  Things We Haven’t Said by Erin Moulton  
4.  Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer
5.  Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture  -- and What We Can Do About It by Kate Harding

References
 
Hadley, H. L. (2018). Good mother/bad mother: The representation of mothers in recent Printz Award winning literature. The ALAN Review,45(2), 23-34.
 
Giamalva, A. (2015). Does family matter: The parental roles of young adult media. SLIS Connecting, 4(1), 1–11.
 
Lewis, M. A., Petrone, R., & Sarigianides, S. T. (2016). Acting adolescent? Critical examinations of the youth-adult binary in Feed and Looking for Alaska. The ALAN Review, 43(2), 43–50.
Moore, A. (2018). We believe her: Sexual assault and friend/ally/ship in Exit, pursued by a bear. The ALAN Review, 46(1), 15–27.
 
Niemi, N., Smith, J. B., & Brown, N. (2014). The portrayal of teachers in children ’s popular fiction. Journal of Research in Education, 20(2), 58–80.

Until next weeks.