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  • Rachel Juay

Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustice



by Cassidy Clark


In this video, Anastasiya Varenytsya ‘22 introduces us to Kingfishers for Consent, a sexual wellness peer educator group at Yale-NUS College, and the work it does to combat testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice are two forms of epistemic oppression, which is oppression that occurs at the level of knowledge.


Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker is unfairly disbelieved about their experience because the hearer is prejudiced against some facet of the speaker’s social identity. One example of testimonial injustice is that survivors of sexual harassment and assault are routinely disbelieved about their experiences. This is not because their individual stories are dubious or are themselves untrustworthy people, but because there are misconceptions in society about survivors as a group. Many people think that survivors falsely and malevolently accuse others, exaggerate, or that they are actually themselves responsible for the violence they experienced. We can combat our complicity in testimonial injustice by improving our ‘credibility assessments’-- that is, our reasoning patterns that we use to determine whether to believe or disbelieve the testimony of certain groups of people-- so that they are not affected by unjust prejudices.


Anastasiya reports that Kingfishers for Consent has worked to combat such testimonial injustice on campus in two ways: firstly, their Take Back the Night event empowers survivors to share their experiences in a setting of solidarity, giving survivors the platform to speak and breaking the stigma of discussing sexual assault. Secondly, their Listen and Believe workshops train peers in how to support and believe their friends who say they have experienced sexual assault. Survivors often turn to their friends first after they have experienced trauma, so the workshops aim to make sure friends appropriately and helpfully receive the survivors’ testimonies.


Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a significant area of someone’s social experience is obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation. An example of hermeneutical injustice would be when survivors have difficulty recognizing and talking about their experiences of assault and harassment because they lack the vocabulary or concepts to label them as such; the fact that such concepts are not already readily available is a sign of hermeneutical injustice.

Kingfishers for Consent has worked to combat such hermeneutical injustice by creating dialogue spaces on campus. These dialogue spaces equip students with robust concepts of consent and healthy sexual encounters. Given that Yale-NUS students come from very different contexts across the world, it is important to build these shared conceptual frameworks so as to have both a shared framework for discussion and a shared understanding that can work to prevent further instances of sexual violence on campus.

Kingfishers for Consent has faced some difficulties in combating these forms of oppression on campus. For example, participation in the events they have organized has sometimes been low. This has led them to strategize on on the most effective ways to spread information and create impact, such as a balance between active and passive campaigns. Another interesting difficulty they face is the tension between being a student-facing group, which aims to train students in the sexual wellness skills they want and need, and being sponsored by the DOS, which as an administrative body may not wish to connect itself with some of the sexual wellness-related events students want to see. Kingfishers for Consent only began last semester, so perhaps these challenges will be better addressed as the peer educator group grows and develops over the years.


Thank you Anastasiya for the important work you do with Kingfishers for Consent, and for sharing your expertise with us in this video!


To learn more about these forms of epistemic oppression, a good article to read is: Kristie Dotson’s "A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33, no. 1 (2012): 24-47.



Transcript:

[Opening vignette]

This is how change happens. Its slow and its hard but you just gotta pull through.

Hello, my name is Anastasiya Varenytsya. I am a first year from Chicago, and I’m a member of Kingfishers for Consent which is a peer educator group. It’s centered around consent culture and sexual health. Students know what students want and need best, and so we take the responsibility to get trained and then share that knowledge. So yeah that’s KFC (Kingfishers for Consent) 101.

[Testimonial injustice]

Testimonial injustice occurs when someone is unfairly disbelieved about their experience, because the hearer is prejudiced against that person’s identity. An example of it would be when a survivor comes forth and their disbelieved for their experience. Societally we have these misconceptions about survivors. Sometimes people will ask what were you wearing? What were you drinking? And it’s common to misbelieve them because sexual assault is not taken as seriously as it should be.

[What does KFC do to combat testimonial injustice?]

With Sexual Wellness Week, we have ‘Take Back The Night’, which is a performance space that allows survivors of sexual assault to share their stories. The goal of creating that sort of space is when you’re talking about it and breaking the silence, you can see how many people stand in solidarity with you. And two, it’s a way to break the stigma. We’ve [also] had two workshops this year called ‘Listen and Believe’; we want to equip those friends who know that their friend went through an experience and isn’t sure what it was, so that that friend can be a supporter and active listener and believer in a way that isn’t patronizing or victimizing but is actually helpful.

[Hermeneutical injustice]

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a significant area of someone’s social experience is obscured from social understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in the shared resources for social interpretation. When you do not have the vocabulary or the conceptual basis to understand certain things; for example, for me, it took me four years to call my experience sexual assault. People are coming in not knowing what the hell happened. And so when someone comes forth with sexual assault, but you don’t understand what consent is, then it’s really easy for you to disregard the validity of what they’re saying.

[What does Kingfishers for Consent do to combat hermeneutical injustice?]

We understand that people are coming to college from all over the world. YNC is a international school, you have people coming from all over and of course people are bringing their perspectives and perceptions of relationships and sexuality and gender. What KFC and the school tries to do is we establish these norms and give everyone the same kind of concepts and terminology without it also being specifically westernized or americanized. In our workshops we like to get everyone on the same page, so information and resource sharing. Lots of discussion and the goal is always to create these spaces in which people of all sorts of different opinions can come together and talk. A lot of the topics we work with are not black and white, so we try to create this open neutral space where people come together and discuss these topics. But the way these discussions are actually productive is basic knowledge and stuff like that.

[what challenges does KFC face in combating these issues?]

The turnout this year has generally been low; Sexual Wellness Week was quite popular. But for all the other events we’ve had it was really low. If we want to be an actual reliable resource, we have to figure out the way to get these messages out. [Also] During Sexual Wellness Week, two events were censored and shut down. So for example the kink workshop. It had to do with the fact we were DOS-sponsored. That’s been a very interesting dynamic that we’ve had to negotiate. We are a peer group, supposed to represent peers and yet, we’re quite vanilla. And I don’t know how else to say it. For myself, I’ve definitely learned a lot. Which has been really reaffirming.

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