CSAReps – Investigating Fictional Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture: Myths and Understanding

The project began in January 2024 and its initial phase included recruiting and upskilling the project team to work on this complex, ethically sensitive subject and obtaining the necessary ethical approvals to conduct the studies with the different participant groups. This work has been supported by the project’s primary advisory board of people with lived experience of sexual abuse in childhood, secondary advisory board of academics who research CSA from various disciplinary perspectives and support professionals who work with survivors, and our dedicated Ethics Advisor. 

The project is also supported by its collaborators in the Children’s Health Ireland hospital group and the Irish survivor support organisation One in Four. The core goal of the CSAReps project is to facilitate the voices of survivors to be heard and prioritised in terms of how the representation of their experiences in fiction affects them. The studies with survivors and other participant groups began in 2025. The mapping of the fictional representations is also ongoing and will take the form of an annotated, searchable database of works indexed by genre, medium, representational strategies, etc, hosted open-access on the project website. The team is also conducting an interdisciplinary case study on a contemporary survivor-centred film, analysing its context, paratext, representational strategies, engagement with CSA myths (challenging or corroborating them) and audience reception. 

Research Aims

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.

Timeline

The project will run for 5 years from January 2024 until December 2028

Funding

The project is funded by the European Research Council