“I don’t know why that most horrible part comes up to me now” – Victoria Pöhls & Aleksandra Milenović present on readers’ (dis)engagement with CSA fiction at Everyday Reading of Literature (EROL) in Zagreb.

“I don’t know why that most horrible part comes up to me now” – Readers (Dis)Engagement with Texts representing Child Sexual Abuse Reading can be a way of engaging with so-called ‘difficult topics’ usually avoided (Menninghaus et al. 2017). One such issue is child sexual abuse (CSA): Despite being a critical issue affecting one-in-eight children worldwide (Sanjeevi et al. 2018; European Commission 2024) with potentially grave mental and physical health consequences (Hailes et al. 2019), it remains a relatively taboo subject. Notwithstanding the social avoidance, CSA is widely represented in literary fiction and autobiographies, which may also affect victim-survivors’ and wider public understandings of the issue. Can engaging with (fictional) representations in the ‘safe space’ of books at least partly counteract the societal flinch and correct harmful preconceptions about CSA? To date, research into how fiction representing CSA affects audiences who spontaneously come across CSA as part of their everyday reading is very limited. Therefore, we collaborated with the PoKUS team to investigate mentions of texts representing CSA in their corpus of 1005 Croatian readers discussing self-chosen books. An initial corpus review resulted in the identification of 29 books mentioning or alluding to CSA. These range from works where CSA is a central theme (e.g., Nabokov’s “Lolita”), to those where it is integral to the character’s backstory or a driving force in the plot (e.g., Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner”), or where CSA is merely a peripheral element (e.g., Martin’s “Game of Thrones”).

First, we tried to ascertain whether respondents, unprompted by the interviewers, would mention CSA at all when discussing their reading experiences (RQ1), expecting that this would vary according to the topic’s prominence within the book.

Second, we explored what aspects of CSA were mentioned (RQ2): Did readers focus on the fact of representation itself, on graphic scenes, on their own (emotional) reaction to the depiction, or did they offer thoughts that went beyond the reading, relating the story to life experiences or societal consequences? A qualitative thematic analysis revealed that strong and mixed emotional responses occurred only in some participants, but they were remembered even after a significant amount of time had passed since the initial reading. Notably, respondents volunteered very different kinds of ‘lessons learnt’.

Thirdly, we focused on the way CSA was discussed by respondents (RQ3) and analyzed the terms used to describe CSA as well as subvocal expressions and pauses potentially hinting at discomfort in talking about this theme.

Lastly, we considered whether participants adopted a victim-survivor-centred perspective when discussing the books, or whether they instead endorsed variations of harmful CSA myths (Glina et al. 2022), e.g. victim blaming (RQ4). We will relate our findings to the representation in the specific book to provide an indication of whether authorial ways of representing CSA can be connected to readers’ perception of it and whether there is any evidence of the texts helping overcome the flinch. These analyses, grounded in the ecologically-valid PoKUS corpus, will help us to gain a deeper comprehension of the impact of (specific) representations on actual readers, informing future research in this area.