On The Construction Of Evidence: Medical Practices Of Identifying Sexual Violence

• In Event: ‘Evidence-making Intervention’: Transforming Implementation Science 2

Abstract

The phenomenon of violence always was object of scientific categorization and classification. Significantly, as Ian Hacking (1999) has pointed out, in the 1960s the visualization of bone fractures through x-ray allowed the social construction of „the battered child syndrome“. Visualization still remains an important tool to identify child abuse (e.g. Tsokos & Guddat 2014). This paper will analyse the working practices of a walk-in clinic for sexually abused children in Germany. Hospitals increasingly provide special walk-in clinics for victimized infants, because injuries involving infants are often minimized by regular pediatricians and hospital staff. The project aims at studying doctor-child consultations, in order to understand the practices of seeing, measuring, reading and writing from an ethnographic perspective. It especially focusses on the documents that are used and asks how they furnish scientific evidence of sexual violence. What underlying concept of evidence-making intervention is utilized? What does visualization contribute to it?

Literature:
Hacking, Ian (1999): The Social Construction of What? Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Tsokos, Michael & Guddat, S. (2014): Deutschland misshandelt seine Kinder. München: Droemer.

Author

• Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann, University of Kassel