Who has to tell their trauma story and how hard will it be? Influence of cultural stigma and narrative redemption on the storying of sexual violence.

Although survivors of sexual violence have shared their stories with the public on social media and mass media platforms in growing numbers, less is known about how general audiences perceive such trauma stories. These perceptions can have profound consequences for survivor mental health. In the present experimental, vignette-based studies, we anticipated that cultural stigma surrounding sexual violence and cultural preference for positive (redemptive) endings to adversity in the United States (U.

Giving Voice to Silence: Empowerment and Disempowerment in the Developmental Shift from Trauma 'Victim' to 'Survivor-Advocate'.

In the past several years, a public conversation in the United States about interpersonal violence has flourished, sustained by the work of advocates who are themselves survivors. This surge in public sharing of trauma stories is a rhetorical form of resistance to ideologies in mainstream American culture that impose silence on survivors (e.g.