First person: the right to bodily autonomy
Still from Trauma Weakens You, a short film by Emma Hakansson.
As was true of my child abuse, it is not that other animals have no right to bodily autonomy. It is that we are deeply wrong to deny it.
To experience child sexual abuse, for me, was to experience the theft of my self worth. Our self worth is inherently attached to our autonomy. Those who permit and commit harm to us do so through a dominating denial of our inherent value. This denial leaves us unfree to decide what we do and what is done to ourselves: to our bodies. I could not help but internalise the perception of me as worthless.
When treated as though I had no value beyond what could be taken from me and my body, it was very hard – in fact I failed – to digest this as anything but truth. It is very hard to dislodge all the jagged pieces of that ideology from a body. That hardness continues even many years later, even as, in my growth, I have learned to intellectualise the real truth. It is not that I am unworthy of the basic right that is bodily autonomy. It is that someone decided to violate that right, and they are deeply, deeply wrong to have done so.
It is not only me, not only children, not only women nor only us humans who suffer the violation of their bodily autonomy. But let me return to that in a moment.
I was only a decade old myself when I was being sexually abused by an adult several decades older. I doubt I will ever be capable of contorting my mind into a position that could fathom how someone cared so little for my safety, ignored so readily the pain they were inflicting. How could someone accept that they were eroding me?
A part of my erosion came through dissociation. A loss of self through a loss of presence. When the body and mind suffer trauma, it learns that it is safer to exist in an only semi-lucid state. It is how I survived the most depraved of the abuse against me. Such dissociation is something I recognise in my fellow animals: those who bear immense trauma inflicted upon them by an industrially scaled human egocentrism.
The first time I stepped inside a pig factory farm, I extended a slow, loosely closed hand towards a mother pig. She was lying down, light pink skin stretched over concrete, and enclosed by metal bars. Her eyes moved only so far as required to assess my hand for risk before blurring into oblivion again. No curiosity nor engagement, nothing left behind her eyes. For that, no one could blame her. I saw my dissociation in her own.
I stroked the wiry hairs of her cheek. She gazed on like neither she or I were there amongst the rows of other pigs laying rough with scabbing sores and swollen teats. Her piglets clambered over them as they fought for drink. A few slept, one in a twitching shiver like death was coming close. One wobbled on fresh legs towards my gloved hand. Only when I pet his tiny side with a single finger did the mother re-emerge: a brief eye dart to her babe, then to me, a quivered jolt of her foot need she rise. But to rise was exhausting. We were all still. I pet her too with my free side and the mother sow disappeared again.
Scientists tell us that humans and our fellow animals share experiences of trauma and psychological distress: our shared brain structures and physiological mechanisms make it so. Our human-centrism means such similarity is exploited in laboratories where animals are used in tests to understand their suffering: but mostly only to help our kind bear it. Dissociation amongst animals can occur as in humans too, as a symptom of a kind of post-traumatic stress injury. Confinement to factory farms and mutilations carried out there – like those that lost the pig chunks from her ears, cut as identity markers – can cause this dissociation.
Dissociation starts as a kind of defensive reaction for those unable to flee. During my abuse, laid on the floor with my school dress up, my brain removed me from the situation. The girl on the ground was hollowed out, and so less hurt. In my work to end animal exploitation and oppression in the fashion industry, I have watched undercover footage on farms where I see the same in sheep.
There is a lamb: just weeks young, precious, unfamiliar with the world, and so still unaware of a need for distrust. She is picked up and hurled into a cradle. This cradle has no bedding but is metal and splays her legs apart as she, too, lays on her back. A short spray of disinfectant, another of numbing that won’t work until it’s too late, and then sharp bladed shears like scissors. They slice off her skin around her genitals and anus: a wool industry practice against millions each year. While the lamb to her left who just suffered the same bleats a scream, this lamb goes limp. Head drooped to the side, total silence, not a movement. Neither of us, in any species’ language, could utter ‘no’ or ‘help’. From our backs, no one would have listened if we had.
In the years after I could get off my back, I snapped and ripped into people with words. It was another defence. I was a cat with her back high, fur bristled and hissing “don’t come close”. If my dear mum forgot that my crying no longer meant a hug to make it better, sometimes I would yell out, unintentionally cruel, twitching against kind touch. It no longer felt safe to be held.
It was similar when I met another sow, further down the rows. Again, my hand outstretched with careful slowness. I wanted to comfort her. She did not want that comfort. Not from me, not from my kind. She had been in a rage, one I heard before I saw her, and I only worsened it. Metal clang as she moved back against her crate bars. My being close was distressing. I was in the shape of a species who only engaged with her kind to artificially impregnate, to rip newborn piglets off teats and cut their testicles and teeth, to take away older piglets for fattening before killing and eating. To her, I was the shape of danger.
My mother was the shape of danger too. It was no fault of her own, her being the most dutifully loving carer of my life. But she shared the form of the old woman who sexually abused me, so my mum was the shape of someone scary. In fact, all adult people were, so I did not want them close to me. As a child, I did not hug my parents for many years. I made a few concessions over their birthdays. Even in my most shaking sobs, when they would whisper “would I want a hug”, I would flinch, feeling pierced by a desperation for comfort encased in a debilitating fear. Trauma had morphed old comforts to feel like traps.
Peer-reviewed research shows us that our fellow sentient creatures, likely as with the pig frightened by my shape, also suffer post traumatic stress disorder, following exposure to stressors we as victims could not control. Humans corrupt and debase children as they prey on innocent weakness. We do the same unto other animals each time we treat them as commodities bred for trade through mass abuse and slaughter, yet as a collective we pass no similar judgement, enforce no similar criminal law. Our systems and psyches do not truly see animal bodies, fears or feelings and so we fail to notice when their bodily autonomy is thieved just like mine was. In my case, I still got to keep my life.
That night in the factory farm, I moved on from that pig. I saw in her eyes, a blue like my own, a deep distress. I did not want to be the cause and so I moved further down the line, all pale pink skinned pigs in their own states of depression, rage, psychosis and dissociation.
For some years I walked the world as a kind of blur: large swathes of life are patchy of memory, I have spent much time in the dark, on a bed sweat through with fear and with eyes dull and careless. Should I ever have a child of my own, I know there is risk of my trauma being bestowed on them, a generational burden I must work hard not to share. Research warns it may pass on neurologically, grown into their brain while in my belly, despite my efforts. When I walk through that row of pigs again in my mind, see again those with swollen bellies and no bedding to birth into, I imagine research would show the same intergenerational trauma has transformed them. But we have not researched it, because we do not care.
While I cannot contort my mind to understand the adult who I trusted yet who abused me, I have reconfigured my brain around social norms of oppression against those like the pigs and lambs I saw. Against a culturally decided supremacy over animals which bleeds inconsistency onto our supposed understanding of autonomy and rights. I wonder what human generation will break this nonsense spell en masse. I wonder when we will see that to deny anyone – no matter the species – their bodily autonomy, the right to their own movement, to their own flesh and life, is a crime. I wonder when we will see our kind as one collective, one multispecies society of coexistence, not violent hierarchy.
Just as it was true for me, it is not that other animals do not have a right to bodily autonomy. It is that we are deeply, deeply wrong to deny it to them.
– Emma Hakansson
