Some thoughts on ‘groping’: naming uninvited touching
Posted by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper
on October 11, 2012
Thank you Jeremy for the welcome, and thank you for having me at
Talking Philosophy. I’m looking forward to joining in the discussion!
For my first two posts, I’m going to talk about my own personal
experiences of the phenomenon that philosopher
Miranda Fricker
calls ‘
epistemic injustice’. This is the injustice that occurs when
someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a bearer of
knowledge. There are two main types of epistemic injustice –
hermeneutical, and testimonial. In this first post I’m going to talk
about the former, and in my next post I’ll discuss the latter.
Just over a year ago, at an academic conference, something unpleasant
happened to me. I would like to be able to tell people about it. I
wanted to tell people about it at the time, as it seemed like the kind
of thing that should probably be reported to the conference organizers.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure what it was that had happened. Thirteen
months and a great deal of pondering the incident later, and I’m still
not. As you can imagine, that makes telling people about it rather
difficult.
I can describe the incident in detail, of course. Over a period of
perhaps twenty minutes, another delegate at the conference – repeatedly
and without my consent – touched my head, hair, neck, lower back, inside
of my forearms, all the while indifferent to my distress and
discomfort. (I want to go into lengthy detail here to try to explain why
I didn’t tell him not to touch me or otherwise put a stop to it, but
I’m going to resist.)
There have been many other incidents like this in my life, and I
would be so bold as to claim that all women have several of their own
versions of this story – most far worse than mine. I can give you a
pretty accurate physical description of the incident. And I know that
what this person did was wrong, because it is wrong to touch someone
without consent. But what I am not sure about is what
type of incident this was; what label to give it, what category to assign it to.
Once I had extricated myself from the situation I tracked down the
conference organizers and tried to tell them what had happened. But I
found myself lost for words. I didn’t possess any vocabulary to
accurately report what had happened to me. I was upset and angry, which
won’t have helped. But in the time that has elapsed since, I still
haven’t figured out what I should have said. After much stopping,
starting and stuttering, I eventually told them that the man in question
had ‘sexually harassed’ me. I didn’t think that was right at the time,
and I still don’t. I just didn’t know what else to say.
The other possibility that immediately springs to mind is ‘sexual
assault’. My knowledge of the law and its correct interpretation is not
good enough for me to comment on whether incidents like this are legally
regarded as sexual assault. The UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that
intentional touching is sexual assault if the touching is sexual, the
person being touched does not consent, and the person does not
reasonably believe that they have consented. The issue here would be
whether stroking someone’s neck, back or inner arm constitutes ‘sexual
touching’. I don’t know, and don’t want to speculate, because it’s not
really the legal situation that I’m most interested in here. Rather,
what I’m concerned with is the social meaning of events such as these –
the label we collectively give them, the category to which we as a moral
community assign them.
I didn’t describe this incident as sexual assault to the conference
organizers, and whether or not legally it would be regarded as such, it
feels to me that it would be inaccurate to use that term. To me – and I
think to most people who hear that phrase – sexual assault denotes
something much more serious and traumatic than the mildly obnoxious
unwanted touching I experienced. If this person had touched the more
obviously sexual areas of my body, then I would consider that to be
sexual assault. But it just doesn’t seem correct to call unwanted
touching of my arm, neck and back to be sexual assault. Not only does it
feel overly dramatic and an exaggeration to refer to it in such terms;
it also seems to me that to call it sexual assault is to diminish the
experiences of other people who have been victims of serious sexual
assaults. To equate the mild distress of someone stroking my neck with
the trauma and shock that must accompany serious sexual assaults feels
attention-seeking, and somehow disrespectful.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe it’s symptomatic of how widespread
such incidents are, and how acceptable our culture considers them, that
even their victims resist labelling them as sexual assault. But even if
that’s true, the fact remains that I am uncomfortable with that label.
It just doesn’t feel accurate to describe these incidents as sexual
assaults, and I feel pretty confident that most other people would share
that intuition – if I were to say I had been sexually assaulted, and
then describe what happened in detail, they would think I was being
misleading and melodramatic. The other possible remaining terminology is
to say I was ‘groped’, a phrase that’s being employed rather a lot in
the popular press just now. But I am not sure if that is correct either –
‘groping’ is a very vague and ill-defined term and I’m not sure exactly
what it refers to. Must groping involve only the obviously sexual areas
of the body, or can you grope someone’s neck, arms or legs? Is groping
different from stroking? Although I have some vague hunches myself about
how to answer these questions, the fact I’m asking them suggests there
is no clear consensus on what groping is.
So what follows from all this is that I don’t have any label to give
to this incident, and others like it. I know what happened; but I don’t
know what
type of thing happened. And this is a further harm to
suffer – not only has an unpleasant thing happened, but I am also
unable to name what that unpleasant thing was.
The problem of lacking terminology by which to identify these kinds
of minor assaults seems to be a paradigm case of what philosopher
Miranda Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’. This is the injustice
that occurs when ‘some significant area of one’s social experience [is]
obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical
marginalization’. Hermeneutical marginalization occurs when members of a
particular disadvantaged group – in this case, women – are prevented
from participating as equals in the creation of social meanings. Members
of powerful social groups are in a privileged position with respect to
the construction of our collective hermeneutical resources. That is,
they have more influence over the creation of the social frames of
reference by which people make sense of their lives and their
experiences, while members of less advantaged social groups have less
influence. The result of this marginalization is that there is a gap in
our collective frameworks for interpreting and making sense of the
social world, a gap which prevents some people – in this case, women –
from being able to understand and make sense of their experiences.
Historically, women have been under-represented from those jobs or roles
that are central for the construction of social meaning – jobs in
politics, law or the media, for example. They have therefore been
marginalized from the processes whereby we come to recognize and label
certain practices or events and place them within a framework of
meaning. As a result, they are prevented from understanding or
communicating the things that happen to them. As Wittgenstein famously
said: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
The very fact that our collective hermeneutical resource – that is,
our shared frameworks of meaning and reference – lacks vocabulary for
describing the kind of thing that happened to me at this conference
suggests that this form of injustice has taken place. It is startling
that we do not have the language to adequately capture this kind of
event, when it is such a commonplace feature of women’s lives. Most, if
not all, women will experience this kind of uninvited physical contact
several times in their lives; and yet we don’t have any terminology with
which to discuss it. And the crucial claim is that this is an
additional injustice – in addition to the wrong of being touched without
one’s consent, a further wrong occurs when the victim of this touching
is left without the interpretive resources to describe and make sense of
what has happened to her. Not only is she unable to accurately report
her experience to others. She is unable to understand it herself, and in
interpreting it has to rely on the existing set of social meanings –
which, in the case of unwanted touching, often represents this as
harmless flirtation. This can lead to confusion and distress, as well as
a sense of being alone in our experiences, when in fact they are
examples of a wider pattern of behaviour for which we currently have no
name. Indeed, lacking the interpretive resources to make sense of our
experiences can be extremely damaging to our selfhood and identity. On a
plausible account of personal identity, we are all engaged in a process
of self-understanding, trying to make our actions, beliefs and emotions
coherent and intelligible – first to ourselves, and then to others. If
the existing set of social meanings – and of course, this is the only
set we have to draw on – lacks the resources for us to make sense of the
things that happen to us, it denies us the capacity to work our how it
is appropriate for us to respond, and denies us the ability to render
our own behaviour and emotional responses intelligible. This has a
dramatic impact on our identities and sense of self.
So how can we remedy this injustice? I’m not sure, but one possibility (as some
feminist bloggers have
suggested) is to insist upon calling these incidents sexual assaults,
and to try to raise consciousness among both men and women that this is
what uninvited touching is. While I am happy with the implication that
both men and women ought to be encouraged to take these incidents more
seriously, I still worry that calling these minor incidents sexual
assault may have the consequence of diminishing the seriousness of
other, more obvious cases. So I don’t claim to have the solution. But
I’m happy enough here to have highlighted the double injustice that
these forms of uninvited touching involve – first in the wrongness of
the touching itself, and second in the effective silencing of those who
suffer it.
