"Why Didn't She Say Something Sooner?": Doubt, Denial, Silencing, and the Epistemic Harms of the #MeToo Movement

"Why Didn't She Say Something Sooner?"Doubt, Denial, Silencing, and the Epistemic Harms of the #MeToo Movement Heather Stewart (bio) "It may be that the most debilitating postmemories … are those instilled by silence." (Susan J. Brison)1 "Why didn't you say something Sooner?" has become a familiar refrain—a question frequently leveled at those victims/survivors2 of sexual violation3 who delay their decisions to bring forward testimonies or reports of their experiences until sometime in the future, at times, long after the event(s) transpired. This question ("why didn't you/she say something sooner?") is not only a linguistic mechanism for casting doubt on the testimonies of particular victims in isolated situations (i.e., to the person the question is directed at), but, given the regularity with which this question is asked of victims/survivors, has also come to reflect broader, deep-seeded epistemic assumptions about members of particular identity groups (namely, women and especially queer women or women of colour) and their abilities to be credible givers of knowledge more generally. This question—and the epistemic assumptions loaded into it—contributes to the structural and systemic doubting of victims/survivors of sexual violation at both social and political levels. This pervasive doubting of victims/survivors contributes to various forms of epistemic injustice against them4 and, consequently, harms victims/survivors in a variety of ways. While the harms that victims/survivors often experience in the aftermath of sexual violation, and subsequently in deciding whether or not and when to report it, are many and varied—ranging from physical harms to their bodies, to psychological and emotional harms, and interpersonal or social harms—this paper seeks to highlight a distinct type of harm that victims/survivors too often experience when bringing forth (or withholding) testimony of sexual violation, namely, epistemic harm. The role of epistemic harm as a distinct and significant category of harm experienced by victims/survivors of sexual violation (particularly End Page 68 during the current cultural and political rise of the #MeToo movement) has been undertheorized in the growing scholarly engagement with victims/survivor testimony in the #MeToo movement, and this paper intends to rectify this gap. In what follows, I argue that a particular category of harm—that which is characteristically epistemic in nature—is pervasive among those choosing whether, how, and when to bring forward testimony of sexual violation, particularly as part of a larger movement among victims/survivors, but nevertheless has not been sufficiently analyzed in scholarly examinations of the movement. Moreover, I argue that insofar as the uniquely epistemic harm that results from a variety of oppressive epistemic phenomena (namely, testimonial injustice, gaslighting, and testimonial smothering) are serious and enduring, the nature of this harm and its effects on victims/survivors are worth attending to in their own right. More precisely, I contend that an adequate understanding of the various harms experienced by victims/survivors of sexual violation demands an exploration of this particular category of harm. Doing so helps to elucidate a morally significant dimension of a rapidly growing movement. The paper will proceed as follows. In section I, I will contextualize the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice as it has developed in feminist and social epistemology literatures.5 I will then describe three distinct forms that epistemic injustice can take, all of which are prevalent in the era of the #MeToo movement. In section II, I will draw out the harms of the three types of epistemic injustice detailed in section I. Importantly, I will show how these harms are serious and enduring not only for those victims/survivors who experience them qua individuals, but also for victims/survivors as a group, whose credibility is collectively undermined as doubt pervades at social and political levels. This, I con-tend, also has important social and political consequences, particularly for shaping the backdrop in which these conversations are happening. With analyses of the epistemic phenomena and their related harms in hand, in section III, I examine one recent case, that of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony of sexual violation against then United States Supreme Court nominee (now United States Supreme Court Justice), Brett Kavanaugh. This case...