Sexual Violence: Ethnophenomenological Analysis of the Experience of Affected Persons

Sexual violence is part of the lifeworld of many people and by no means a marginal phenomenon. It takes place in different forms in public and private spaces. Which phenomena are identified as sexual violence (e.g. in public or legal discourse) evolves dynamically and in social embedded processes. Apart from the partly dynamic limits of the phenomenon, there is another methodological challenge: Sexual violence is a bodily experience. It is always corporeal, both on the part of the perpetrators and on the part of the targeted person. Interactions without physical contact can be also important here, such as insults or exhibitionism. The specific type of sensuality and spatiality must be addressed in a differentiated manner. Since sexual violence is always bodily and sensual, special methods and methodological concepts are needed to understand the primarily bodily sense of the experience and to make it available in verbal language for research. Thereby researchers must also fight against the fact that sexual violence is still strongly tabooed in society and therefore often remains veiled. In view of these challenges, I decided to conduct open interviews with affected persons, in which the interviewees themselves discuss their experiences. In this context, I will use the data collected in interviews to discuss how to methodically deal with bodily phenomena that partly elude visibility, comprehensibility, and verbalization. A qualitative and inductive approach is necessary to gain a better understanding of the experiences sexual violence. Based on the methodological challenges mentioned above, the approach of ethnophenomenology is used, which sheds light on subjective sensual experiences. The reflexive attention is enacted by the interviewees themselves. In this way, the bodily experience can be analyzed. The analysis resulted in differentiating the narrated experiences by their specific corporeality, their reciprocity and their temporality.