Relational Remembering Quotes

“There is a much greater skepticism toward the memories of those who claim abuse than toward the memories of those who deny it.”
― Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars

“The framing of women’s abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people’s memories can.”
― Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars

“The FMSF achieved prominence partly as a response to increased possibilities for women to institute criminal or civil proceedings that relate to historical abuse, and women do not often take their abusers to court. The foundation's framing of abuse serves an ulterior strategic purpose of constructing a narrative position that isolates the incest survivor in an adversarial setting of interpreter distrust and challenged.”
― Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars