Shame & Stigme: I’ve not told them about your CSA because I wanted them to meet you as you
“I’ve not told them about your CSA because I wanted them to meet you as you.”
This is something that was said to me on Saturday before leaving for an event where I would be meeting some new people for the first time. I always find it interesting how the most innocuous comments in the flow of conversation are sometimes the most telling, and often the most painful. This comment hurt because it was the type of comment that shows the reality I live in, a reality where my experiences mean I will be judged and stigmatised.
For me it hit to the core of why I often feel out of place when I’m with people who know my story, it’s the reason work is hard to come by despite my talents and proven track records. It is the truth in a single innocent comment that revealed stigma and shame. It’s the language of a world that still sees survivorship as a disqualifier, something to be managed or withheld for me to be received “as me.” It’s an attempt at protection, but it exposes the painful social truth that for CSA survivors, “being seen as you” is often imagined to be incompatible with “being known in full.”
Comments like this pierce deepest because they are unguarded. There is no performance and no false reassurance in these comments; it is raw social logic at work. And that logic says if they know your full story, they might treat you differently. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because of what people project onto survivorship of childhood sexual abuse.
CSA survivorship is seen as something that taints. Something that needs to be managed, hidden, deferred. This is the logic the University of Glasgow used when the management hid the first Victorious Voices exhibition out of sight. There is a particular kind of erasure that doesn’t happen through violence, but through silence. Through the subtle reshaping of a room after your truth becomes known. People don’t shout you down; they just stop inviting you. They don’t attack your work; they just never hire you again. They don’t argue; they simply choose someone else.
When you speak openly about surviving CSA, you become difficult to place. Suddenly, you are “brave” but are often standing alone. That’s the quiet cost: you stop being seen as a person and start being seen as a disruption. A risk. A mirror people don’t want to look into. People give you space that you never asked for. Even those who care, especially those who care, flinch in subtle ways. Their voice changes, and their gaze turns cautious. You learn to watch for that look: the one that says, “I don’t know how to hold this.”
So, when someone says, “I didn’t tell them about your CSA. I wanted them to meet you as you,” what they mean, often without knowing it, is I am ashamed. It’s framed as protection and care, but the question is: who is really being protected? What’s being protected is other people’s ease, comfort and perception. I am not separate from what I’ve lived through. There is no version of me you can introduce that leaves the rest behind.
And deeper still, it protects abusers. Because this kind of protection isn’t neutral. It’s a form of pre-emptive sanitising, a way of softening the world for everyone but the survivor. When we don’t name abuse, we don’t have to name abusers. When we don’t talk about survivors, we don’t have to talk about how many of us there are, or why. The more palatable I make my story, the easier it is for the world to pretend the violence that shaped it was an anomaly. A one-off. A personal tragedy, not a public pattern. And that’s the lie.
That comment, “I didn’t tell them about your CSA, I wanted them to meet you as you”, might seem harmless. But look closer, and it carries the assumption that abuse is shameful for me. That it’s something I should be discreet about because it reflects badly on who I am, not the person who committed it. And that’s how abuse thrives: in social codes and careful omissions. The silence may feel soft, but its consequences are sharp.
The answer can’t be to hide.
