INTERVIEWS WITH GRACE POORE
Video Advocacy
(A section of this interview was published in Voices Of Sakhi, Fall 2001.)
Krittika Ghosh: Do you consider your work as a filmmaker a form of activism? How do you balance your responsibility to inform and organize people with the logistics of making a film that would be widely viewed?
Grace Poore: Yes, I do see my work as a videomaker as a form of activism, not only because of the kinds of documentaries I produce, but also because of the process I choose to make the videos. For instance, I often find myself in the role of advocate and crisis support person while also being the researcher, interviewer and producer. I also sometimes open myself to being vulnerable when I am talking with survivors of family-based violence -- so that there isn't a neat divide between the image-maker and the imaged. Facilitating workshops or community discussions is an extension of my activism because I use my own videos to do community education. These discussions not only give me a chance to see firsthand how people respond to the video but they also give me a chance to engage in discussion on the issues central to the video. So I don't disengage from the issue just because a video is completed. It's all part of an ongoing mutual awareness-raising effort. Lastly, I sometimes have the pleasure of being able to work with people on-site who want to organize around issues that the video has highlighted. So I become part of an organic process of people responding to the video and then galvanizing around it to take some concrete action.
KG: Sex is considered a taboo subject of discussion in most South Asian communities. What led you to focus on incest for your documentary?
GP: The most obvious reason for making this documentary is that incestuous sexual abuse is prevalent enough to be merit urgent attention. But the more urgent reason for producing this video had to do with the huge gap between the numbers of South Asian women who were being sexually abused and those who were talking about it. I was disturbed by this disparity, particularly when I found that otherwise outspoken South Asian women were silent about their own experiences of childhood sexual abuse. While their silence is understandable, what an irony and a tragedy that we can speak out about so many injustices -- racism, economic exploitation, and other issues affecting women but not about this one -- about what happened to us. So I wanted to confront the dichotomy that so many women face, including activists working to end violence against women. They have to choose between which silences to break and which silences to preserve because they too are not safe to speak from a place of "this happened to me."
KG: Could you please describe the process of finding and selecting the women you interviewed in the documentary? You must have spent a lot of time building a relationship with the women in order for them to trust you. How did the fact that you are a survivor yourself affect your relationship with them?
GP: In the US, I met incest survivors through my work as an activist in the battered women's movement. I was also able to connect with women's groups in South Asia and meet activists who knew women who had been sexually abused as children. And from there it was the slow work of meeting women, building trust, and relying on word of mouth to spread word about the project so that more women would come forward. At some point during one of the interviews, I would disclose to the survivor that I was also sexually abused as a child. This information usually changed the dynamic between us because she now felt that I understood what she was talking about.
KG: It seemed like a majority of the women the documentary focused on were urban and middle class. Why was that?
GP: Whether I was in India, Sri Lanka, Canada or the US, I did not find any variations in the incidence of incestuous sexual abuse among South Asians based on religious, educational or socioeconomic differences. The responses from many South Asians in the middle and upper middle classes was, "You should look at this problem among the uneducated people, the village people, the lower class people." In their minds, lack of education and a certain lower class upbringing were somehow connected to child sexual abuse -- this meant they could be in total denial about the prevalence of the problem within their own families and social circles. And yet who were the women I was meeting in the US and Canada who were incest survivors? They were daughters from middle and upper middle class families. And who were the activists in India and Sri Lanka I was meeting who would say, this happened to me too? They were from middle class families. I wanted to produce a documentary that challenged the myth that incestuous sexual abuse is not a serious problem among these communities. The negative consequence of saying, "It doesn't happen in my community," is that when it happens here, these children have nowhere to go, and these women are terrified and ashamed of revealing what happened to them because everybody's saying, "It only happens in uneducated families."
KG: How has the reaction been in the screenings that you have done so far?
GP: The issues that have come up varied on who was in the room -- but one question that came up everywhere was, "What about the perpetrators? What do we do about them? How do we stop them?" That's why I am starting work on a new project that will focus on perpetrators of incest.
KG: What are some of the obstacles that prevent young South Asian women from speaking out about incest and sexual abuse? What are the ramifications of incest in the South Asian community? Is there a support system for incest survivors in our community?
GP: Incest is always difficult to expose in any culture, in any community. But for South Asians, one added risk for speaking out is the stigma attached to being raped, even as a child. In South Asia and the diaspora (and here I do not limit diaspora to the west but include the South Asian Diaspora in Southeast Asia, Caribbean, Africa), the stigma of being sexually abused is linked to the stigma of "losing one's virginity" because virginity is equated with female virtue, with self-worth. This link is made all the more vicious (if you will) because of the priority given to family honor, family harmony, and family reputation which become more important to safeguard than a victim's well-being. This doesn't mean that there aren't families that intervene and stop the sexual abuse but they impose a terrible price on the victim -- her silence. And even if this silencing is done because families believe they are protecting the reputation of the victim, the isolation and the absence of loving messages to counter the victim's sense of shame and self-blame become her secondary level of victimization. It compounds the sexual abuse.
KG: Was making the film a therapeutic experience for you?
GP: Yes in the sense that it made me feel part of a whole circle of women who had gone through this and were in some stage of healing. It also helped me clarify some of my own anger -- moved the anger from the private to the public, from the personal to the collective. And it gave me a way to share what had happened to me with more members of my family. Until the video was completed, only my sister knew.
Read more about The Children We Sacrifice and incestuous sexual abuse issues.
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