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A review by sadiereadsagain
Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir by Lacy Crawford
4.0
Lacey was a student at a prestigious New England boarding school, when at just 15 she was sexually assaulted by two older students. When the school were forced to acknowledge what had happened, they took steps to silence Lacey and basically threatened her education and her reputation. It was only decades later, when other allegations came out concerning the school, that she saw evidence to exactly the depths the school had sank in order to protect its own reputation above the safety of the students in its care. So she wrote this memoir to share her experience of both being an assault victim and a victim of a callous cover-up.
In this memoir, Lacey is both open and eloquent (which is key to a good memoir for me) about not only the abuse that she suffered, but how it impacted on her sense of self and the changes in her behavior as she struggled to come to terms with it. The school is a microclimate made toxic by gender double standards of sexuality, and because it's quite an elite school there is an ingrained culture of upholding the outward appearances of the upper class WASP-y society. So victim blaming is rife, and this was just among the students. When the school can no longer ignore what has happened to Lacey, this victim blaming becomes amplified in the lack of punishment for the perpetrators and the threatened banishment of Lacey. I think she captures perfectly the atmosphere and the attitudes of those around her, both as she experienced them as a 15 year old and then applying the hindsight of her adult views as well.
It's just a deeply sad look at how privilege isn't even equal at the higher levels of society when it comes to violence against women, and how the impact of such trauma can manifest itself in ways that simply fuel victim blaming in the eyes of those who refuse to understand that there is no playbook for how someone should behave or how they should handle such an experience. It also highlights, at least in this school, how reputation is honoured more than even the safety of children, and the extent to which those in control would go to protect it, how easy the system makes it for them to do so.
In this memoir, Lacey is both open and eloquent (which is key to a good memoir for me) about not only the abuse that she suffered, but how it impacted on her sense of self and the changes in her behavior as she struggled to come to terms with it. The school is a microclimate made toxic by gender double standards of sexuality, and because it's quite an elite school there is an ingrained culture of upholding the outward appearances of the upper class WASP-y society. So victim blaming is rife, and this was just among the students. When the school can no longer ignore what has happened to Lacey, this victim blaming becomes amplified in the lack of punishment for the perpetrators and the threatened banishment of Lacey. I think she captures perfectly the atmosphere and the attitudes of those around her, both as she experienced them as a 15 year old and then applying the hindsight of her adult views as well.
It's just a deeply sad look at how privilege isn't even equal at the higher levels of society when it comes to violence against women, and how the impact of such trauma can manifest itself in ways that simply fuel victim blaming in the eyes of those who refuse to understand that there is no playbook for how someone should behave or how they should handle such an experience. It also highlights, at least in this school, how reputation is honoured more than even the safety of children, and the extent to which those in control would go to protect it, how easy the system makes it for them to do so.