CSAReps
Investigating Fictional Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture: Myths and Understanding
The CSAReps project examines the nature and social impact of fictional representations of child sexual abuse (CSA). It explores how CSA is represented in contemporary fictional works such as novels, films and television series. And it investigates how this fiction affects people who read and watch it, especially people who have experienced sexual abuse in childhood.
The core goal of the CSAReps project is to facilitate the voices of survivors to be heard and prioritized in terms of how the representation of their experiences in fiction affects them.
To help achieve this goal, the project has a number of intersecting research aims:
To analyse representations of CSA in key genres (including crime, horror, young adult, and issues fiction) in the culturally prevalent forms of literature, film and television in order to provide a foundational mapping of their themes and form.
To explore how CSA representations may inform social attitudes by performing a series of empirical investigations of audience responses to them, including the responses of CSA survivors, support professionals and members of the general public.
To explore links between the ways in which CSA is represented and the audiences’ responses, ultimately yielding a theoretical model suggesting the relationship between CSA fictions and their effects.
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Dr Ailise Bulfin
Principal Investigator
Dr Ailise Bulfin is a literary and cultural scholar whose research ranges from nineteenth-century to contemporary culture, focusing on cultural representations of major social issues and their reception. She has publications on child abuse, sexual violence, xenophobia, war, catastrophe and climate change, including the monograph, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction. She is Assistant Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin and PI of the European Research Council Starting Grant project entitled ‘Investigating Fictional Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture: Myths and Understanding (CSAReps)’ 2024-28. The project examines how child sexual abuse is represented in fictional works, such as novels, films, and television series, and investigates how these works affect readers and viewers, including survivors of abuse. Her relevant publications include: Ailise Bulfin, ‘“Monster, give me my child”: How the myth of the paedophile as a monstrous stranger took shape in emerging discourses on child sexual abuse in late nineteenth-century Britain’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 43.2 (2021); Ailise Bulfin, ‘“I’ll touch whatever I want”: representing child sexual abuse in contemporary children’s and young adult gothic’, Gothic Studies, 23:1 (2021).
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