This talk, which addresses the themes Language and law and Language as evidence, is based on a newly started PhD dissertation that will analyse how the experience of child abuse is conceived and renegociated by former victims. The notion of child abuse is intrinsically related to its consequences on the victims: according the World Health Organization, it "includes all types of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence and commercial or other exploitation, which results in actual or potential harm to the child's health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust or power". Far from being a stabilised category, it is a historically and socially situated phenomenon which depends on how children's rights and parental roles are considered. For instance, parental authority was redefined in the French Civil Code in 2019, now excluding physical and psychological violence.
Since child abuse is not a stable category, taking into account the interplay between legal definitions of abuse and the victims' viewpoint may help with the characterisation of this reality: to what extent do the legal definitions of abuse coincide with the victims' personal experiences? Are legal definitions cited and/or commented on by the speakers? Using an argumentative and enunciative analysis, I will examine how the victims negociate the reality of their experience in discourse, and therefore how they question or provide evidence for its categorisation as child abuse.
To do so, I will first investigate how abuse is defined by laws in several countries (including France), paying particular attention to the criteria which allow to penalise such parental behaviours; the World Health Organisation's definition will also be analysed in that it belongs to legal interdiscourse. Second, these definitions will be confronted to data produced by former victims of child abuse on an Instagram account, on forums related to child abuse, and in a therapeutic context.
Lagorgette, D. (2010). Présentation. Langage et société, 132(2), 5‑14. https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.132.0005
Renaut, L., Ascone, L., & Longhi, J. (2018). De la trace langagière à l'indice linguistique : Enjeux et précautions d'une linguistique forensique: Éla. Études de linguistique appliquée, N° 188(4), 423‑442. https://doi.org/10.3917/ela.188.0423
