A Responsible Parrhesia? A Review of The Price of Secrecy

The Price of Secrecy immerses the listener in stories of individual trauma, of child abuse and rape, yet also draws lessons from them of wider social significance. It includes moments of narrative catharsis, interspersed with repeated reminders that the stories are unfinished and open-ended—that the solutions lie out there, in social action, rather than in the stories themselves. The series also gestures towards structural critique, especially of ‘the legal constraints’ it identifies, yet it places greater importance on changing the wider culture through challenging the culture of secrecy and shame around victims’ stories of rape and abuse. This centrally means engaging with ‘family constraints’ in the shape of ‘family honour’. Yet it is also families who are presented as being able to ‘find the best resolution or action plan’, ideally with the aid of ‘someone like a therapist in a position of authority’. ‘Responsible listening’ in this context, does not invite the kind of frank and fearless truth-telling, or parrhesia that aims at tearing down hierarchical power relations. On the one hand, the podcast series deliberately invokes the authority of psychiatrists and therapists as sources of prestigious ‘modern’ medical and therapeutic knowledge—inevitably associated with the West—as a way of countering the defensiveness engendered by patriarchal honour codes. On the other hand, the series also shows how the key protagonists in its stories—mainly women—can both challenge and draw on the intimate resources of knowledge and support that family structures can afford, and that neither secrecy, nor a ‘will-to-truth’ that ignores social and cultural context, is productive for the victims.