Trust, Trusting and Trustworthiness in the Words of Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse are known to hold silence around the abusive events and their trauma distress. Existing scholarship suggests damaged abilities to trust as one reason for this, and thus trust becomes located as an impaired propensity in the mind of the survivor. Survivors and service providers alike report trust as important when accessing mental, physical, judicial or religious services, and yet very little empirical evidence exists which interrogates the mechanism of trust building, as opposed to generalised trust propensity. Epistemology into trust is hampered by obscured and conflated definitions, and in mental health settings by the apparent dislocation of the survivor’s propensity to trust from the trustworthiness of their trustee - be that an individual, an institution or society. This study has interrogated trust for CSA survivors using a Mad Studies paradigm to address the research questions: How do survivors describe their own trusting abilities? What previous relational experiences inform survivors’ ability and/or willingness to trust? How do survivors evaluate potential trustees? How does trust influence disclosure? Seventeen participants with a range of characteristics were recruited into the study, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis used to analyse the data. The researcher is a CSA survivor and an autoethnographic account of her interaction with, and shaping of, the data offers a robust reflexivity to evidence the quality of the study. The findings demarcate generalised and relational trust; present a ‘trust enactment model’ of relational trust; delineate the process of building/repairing trust; and advance the utility of ‘transactional trust’. The study foregrounds the centrality of trustee trustworthiness, thus challenging survivor trust deficiency as the sole trust-component in relationality when survivors seek services. The study identifies an epistemological lacuna regarding trustee trustworthiness, and indicates the necessity of further research to establish parameters of trustworthiness when working with CSA survivors.