Helium.com just rejected one of my articles called A Case of Family Murder because it was too graphic! The story is a first-person account of a man who killed his children and two women in a single day. He is a terrific narrator and anyone who wants to know what goes on in the minds of perpetrators will learn a great deal from this story.
I published in Helium because I'm writing a book on Stories Perpetrators Tell and Helium is a way to get the word out about my book.
My dilemma all along has been the graphic nature of the life stories I have collected from perpetrators of violence. I began wanting to understand how they think. I now know. I have been stuck for years figuring out how to present my material so others will read it. I have been afraid of accusations of exploitation.
I look at Criminal Minds, a TV show, and even some CSIs and I think they sometimes have no idea what is going on. They play to old tired plots rather than taking a good look at what perpetrators really think.
Darn, darn, darn. Does anyone have any idea how I can present phenomenological research on violence so other people will read it and learn from it?
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5 comments:
Your research sounds very compelling and necessary. If I were you, I'd just try it with a different publisher/journal. Phenomenological research requires thick, rich description, and its sounds as if you have it.
Thanks for the encouragement. In the last few days I thought of two scholarly articles to write--one on the developmental histories of perpetrators of child sexual abuse and one on motivations for violence or the meanings of violence to perpetrators.
I did this research certainly to inform other scholars but mostly to inform survivors, policy makers, and others who do not read scholarly journals.
I will continue to seek outlets to the general public.
You might consider including yourself as interviewer/hearer/responder in the stories. This will introduce your human reaction, so the reader will identify with you rather than the story tellers.
Thanks, seagull. Excellent discussion. It's been quite an experience to learn about violence through phenomenological methods. I have come to understand so much about it but there is a reaons why other people turn away. It's too painful. Painful or not, however, if we don't look at in square in the eye, then the preptrators will keep right on doing what they do so well.
Jane Gilgun
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) looks at the power of words to construct other people and to silence people about oppressive practices. It is a role of social work to resist oppression. The example I gave above of the 14 year-old girl is an example of the effects of oppressive practices. An example of resistance is the word "queer,"which until fairly recently had negative connotations. The LGBT movement has reclaimed it and it even has surfaced in respectable circles of academia as queer theory.
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