Child Maltreatment and Survival in Jane Rowan’s The River of Forgetting
A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21185628 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Iman El Sayed Raslan (0000-0002-9414-5723, Helwan University), Hanan Barakat Diwidar (0000-0001-5101-7943, Helwan University), Mariem Fathy Mohamed (0009-0008-2094-5251, Helwan University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1680-0982 |
| Publisher | The Association of Professors of English and Translation at Arab Universities - APETAU (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.33806/ijaes.v24i2.611 |
| OpenAlex | W4393073501 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
In the twenty-first century, child maltreatment has broadened our perception of the relationship between child sexual abuse, survival and the healing process from psychological trauma. Trauma narratives are considered personalized responses to the awareness of the drastic effects of sexual assaults on children. Memoirs illustrate the effect of child sexual abuse on memory and identity. This research paper aims at applying Jennifer Freyd’s trauma theory that involves child maltreatment and emotional neglect to Jane Rowan’s The River of Forgetting (2010). It deals with the concept of betrayal trauma, its symptoms and some of the defensive surviving strategies such as dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder (DID) as adaptive responses to childhood sexual abuse. Rowan’s memoir is considered a personal account of her psychological suffering due to her repressed memory of being sexually abused by her father during her early childhood. It examines how the protagonist struggles to survive among persistent traumatic memories that are repressed during forty years of her life. Finally, the textual analysis clarifies the process of recovery from psychological trauma by using psychotherapy, dance therapy, art therapy and scriptotherapy
Art history · Child sexual abuse · Criminology · Forgetting · Medical emergency · Memoir · Poison control · Psychoanalysis · Rowan · Sexual abuse · Suicide prevention · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Medicine · Psychology · Short Stories in Global Literature · Themes in Literature Analysis · Ecology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |