The Body Was Violated, but Not Made Unclean
On Shame, the Body, and the Moral Wrong That Attached Itself to the Wrong Place
“My body was made unclean.”
These words return in several of the conversations that formed the basis of my doctoral dissertation, A Study of Shame. They are expressed in different ways: The body is dirty. It is disgusting. It smells. It reveals what has happened. It has been used for acts that were not in accordance with the person one experienced oneself to be.
Some try to wash it. Others hide it. Some almost wish to leave it behind.
One of the participants says that the abuse remains in the body, that the body sometimes does not feel like hers, and that she would rather be herself without having to be this body. At the same time, she is slowly trying to befriend it again: to regard it as her instrument for doing what she wants, to care for it, and to return to it as something of her own.
It is within this tension that the essay begins:
The body was violated. But was it made unclean?
When the Act Attached Itself to the Body
Sexual abuse is an act carried out by one human being against another. It involves a violation of boundaries, trust, and self-determination. Yet in the survivor’s experience, it is often not primarily the perpetrator’s body that is left marked as dirty.
It is one’s own.
In the conversations, participants describe how the body feels altered because someone used it in a way that was not in accordance with the person’s own wishes. The use itself is experienced as dirty. Bodily fluids, smells, and concrete sensory impressions may intensify this experience, but the dirtiness is not connected only to what was physically on the skin. It becomes connected to what was done to the body.
It is understandable that this happens.
The body was the place where the violation occurred. It was the skin that was touched. It was the body that was held, watched, or used. It may have reacted with pain, freezing, numbness, or involuntary arousal. What happened did not occur in an abstract space. It happened to this body.
But the experience makes a dangerous shift:
From something dirty was done to the body
to the body is dirty.
The act and the body come to be treated as though they possessed the same moral character.
This is where shame takes hold.
Uncleanness as a Moral Idea
The words clean and unclean do not refer only to hygiene.
We also use them morally. Clean intentions. A clean record. Dirty acts. Impure thoughts. A person may be freshly washed and still experience herself as morally soiled.
This language is old. Ideas about body, sexuality, and impurity are woven into religion, culture, upbringing, and custom. Children may learn early that certain parts of the body are private, dirty, or shameful, long before they understand sexuality. When those same parts are later involved in a violation, a language is already available that makes it seem natural to think that the body itself has become unclean.
In the conversations, one participant says that she could shower, scrub, and wash without removing the feeling. Something remained in the body. Another says that a feeling cannot be washed away.
Exactly.
Water can remove what lies on the skin. It cannot by itself correct a moral misplacement.
For what feels like bodily impurity may in reality be the perpetrator’s act attaching itself to the survivor’s understanding of herself.
To Whom Does the Dirtiness Belong?
This question must be asked plainly:
Who did something wrong?
The child who had a body?
Or the adult who violated it?
The answer seems obvious when stated in this way. Yet it is not always obvious in lived experience. The survivor may know intellectually that the perpetrator was responsible and still feel the body itself to be guilty.
Knowledge in the mind and experience in the body do not necessarily move at the same pace.
A person may say:
I know who was responsible.
And at the same time think:
But it was my body this happened to.
The body may be experienced as complicit because it was present. Because it did not escape. Because it froze. Because it adapted. Because it reacted. Because it later carried memories, sensations, and sexual responses the person did not want.
In one of the focus groups, this experience is described as the body having betrayed the person. The body may have experienced pleasure, and this involuntary response was transformed into guilt: I was not only subjected to it; I must have participated. From there, shame may spread to the whole body.
But a body can respond without consenting.
A body can be alive without being guilty.
The Body as Witness, Not Perpetrator
Perhaps the body must be understood differently.
Not as an accomplice, but as a witness.
It carried the event. It did what it could to survive. It tensed, froze, disconnected, or reacted automatically. It continued to breathe. It carried the child through the situation and onward into life.
These reactions were not moral choices. They were the body’s attempts to cope with what was happening.
This also applies when the body reacted in ways the person later feels ashamed of. A physical response does not tell us what the person wanted, approved of, or chose. The body cannot give consent on the person’s behalf.
To regard the body as a witness may open another relationship to it:
This body was there.
It was violated.
It survived.
It is not the perpetrator.
Washing as an Impossible Task
If the body is experienced as dirty, washing becomes understandable.
The material contains both washing of the body and a much wider form of cleansing. Some scrub the skin. Others clean the home, move furniture, polish windows, or make sure that no one can find a speck of dust. One participant describes how she cleaned the house almost continuously. There had to be nothing anyone could criticise.
It is as though the inner problem is moved outward into a world that can be cleaned.
The skin can be washed.
The floor can be scrubbed.
The furniture can be rearranged.
The windows can be polished.
Order can be created where control was previously absent.
Washing is therefore not merely meaningless compulsion. It may be an attempt to do something concrete with an experience that otherwise feels boundless. It provides a task, a movement, and a visible result.
But the task can never be completed.
Because one is trying to cleanse the body of a guilt that never belonged to it.
When a Person Smells an Odour No One Else Can Smell
One of the helpers describes people who are thoroughly washed and smell of soap or perfume, yet still experience another odour as remaining in them. They believe that they themselves and others can smell it.
This is a powerful image of the reality of shame.
Shame does not need external proof. It creates its own sensory impression.
The person does not merely think: I feel unclean.
She may experience: I smell unclean.
The presence of other people therefore becomes dangerous. A handshake, an embrace, or a gaze becomes a test:
Can you notice it?
Can you smell it?
Can you see what my body reveals?
In focus group five, participants describe how users may believe that everyone at the centre immediately sees that they are dirty, unclean, and ugly. The body is experienced as though it reveals the entire history.
But the other person does not necessarily see what the person fears.
That may become the beginning of a new experience.
The Other Person’s Body as a Mirror
One participant says that she had previously experienced her own body as strange. Then she met another woman with similar experiences. She did not see the other woman’s body as strange. This changed something in the way she saw her own body.
It is a remarkable moment.
What she could not give herself, she could give to the other person.
She could look at another human being without disgust.
And if the other woman’s body was not morally contaminated by what she had been subjected to, a question arose:
Why should mine be?
In this way, community may become a mirror that does not merely repeat shame. It may correct it.
Not through the assertion “you are beautiful,” but through an experience:
I do not see in you the repulsiveness you fear I see.
Perhaps you do not need to see it in me either.
More Than the Body—and Yet the Body
One participant says: I am more than my body.
This sentence may be necessary. When the body has been made into the whole measure of a person’s value, it can be liberating to know that a human being cannot be reduced to appearance, sexuality, or what others have done to the body.
I am thoughts, relationships, actions, history, will, and hope.
I am more than the body that was used.
But she also adds: I am my body too.
That is crucial.
The goal cannot be to save the self by abandoning the body. That would preserve the split between a true self and a body one would rather be without.
The way forward must also involve a return:
This is my body.
Not because I chose everything that happened to it.
Not because I like everything about it.
But because it belongs to me and no longer to those who took possession of it.
Becoming friends with the body does not necessarily mean loving every reflection in the mirror. It may begin more soberly:
giving it food,
allowing it to rest,
protecting it,
listening when it says stop,
allowing touch to be voluntary,
using it for something one chooses oneself.
Care Rather Than Cleansing
There is an important difference between cleansing the body and caring for it.
Cleansing assumes that something about the body must first be removed before the body can be accepted.
Care begins with the body already having value.
It does not need to earn care by first becoming clean enough, thin enough, beautiful enough, or less marked by history. It needs care because it is the body of a living human being.
In the conversation, Margaret describes how she tries to care for her body and regard it as her instrument for doing what she wants. As her relationship with the body becomes kinder, the shame diminishes.
This is not a quick solution. She does not say that history disappears. She describes a slow change in her relationship with herself.
From punishment to care.
From scrutiny to presence.
From the question “how can I make this body clean?” to the question “how can I care for the body that carried me here?”
When Touch Can Again Belong to the Person
Reclaiming the body also concerns touch.
A person who has been subjected to abuse may later experience touch as ambiguous. It may be wanted and still trigger fear. A partner’s gaze may feel revealing. Darkness may feel safer because the body is then not seen. The person may be in one place in the mind and another in the body.
This shows how deeply the idea of the unclean body can enter intimacy.
The survivor may think:
If he truly sees me, he will understand how disgusting my body is.
If he knows what happened, he will feel deceived.
If he touches me, he too will be contaminated by my history.
But loving touch cannot by itself erase the violation. The new must be allowed to remain new. A partner cannot demand that intimacy prove that everything has been repaired.
The body must be allowed to discover that it can say yes and no.
That it can withdraw.
That touch can stop.
That intimacy no longer means being taken over.
The Body as a Moral Subject
We often speak of the body as an object: something we have, display, improve, hide, or evaluate.
But the body is also the way a human being participates in the world.
Through the body we enter rooms, hold a child on our lap, take another person’s hand, work, rest, cry, laugh, and set boundaries.
When the body becomes foreign or unclean, the person does not merely lose a positive self-image. She may lose part of the foundation for participating in life. One informant asks, in effect, what a human being has as a starting point if the possibility of a good relationship with one’s own body is taken away. She says that one must learn to care for the body again, and that this takes time.
The body is not moral because it is beautiful or sexually untouched.
It has moral significance because it is the place of a person’s freedom, vulnerability, and encounter with the world.
To violate the body is therefore to violate the person.
But for that very reason, the body cannot be the one that carries the guilt.
The Moral Error Must Be Moved Back
Much of the work with shame can be understood as a process of returning things to their proper place.
The dirtiness must be moved from the body to the act.
The guilt must be moved from the child to the adult.
Responsibility must be moved from the powerless person to the one who had power.
This does not mean that all bodily reactions disappear at once. A person may still feel disgust, wash, hide, or fear touch, even after understanding where responsibility belongs.
But the language can begin to change.
Not:
I am unclean.
But:
I was subjected to an unclean act.
Not:
My body did something shameful.
But:
Someone acted shamefully toward my body.
Not:
I must get rid of the body that carries the history.
But:
I must slowly reclaim the body as mine.
A Scar Is Not an Impurity
One participant says that something will always remain. She describes it as a scar on the soul and calls that scar shame.
A scar is a good image, but it can be understood in several ways.
A scar shows that something happened. It does not make the body unclean.
It may be tender. It may tighten. It may become visible in certain kinds of light. It may affect how the body moves. But the scar is also the body’s way of closing a wound.
It is not the violation itself.
It is a sign that the body continued living after it.
Perhaps shame can also change in this way. Not necessarily by everything that remains disappearing, but by what was previously interpreted as evidence of impurity being understood as traces of a violation for which one was not responsible.
Another Sentence
Perhaps the survivor needs a sentence that can be repeated long before it feels true:
My body was violated, but it was not made unclean.
It was treated as though it did not belong to me, but it belongs to me.
It reacted, but it did not consent on my behalf.
It carried what happened, but it is not guilty.
It may be afraid, angry, numb, or marked.
It may carry scars.
But it is still a human body with a claim to protection, care, and respect.
The impurity does not lie in the skin, the smell, the memories, or the reactions.
It lies in the act that violated another human being’s boundaries.
Returning Home to the Body
There may be no single day on which the body suddenly feels entirely one’s own.
The return may happen through small acts:
eating because the body needs food,
resting without punishing oneself for it,
choosing clothes that feel safe,
looking in the mirror without having to evaluate,
setting a boundary and experiencing that it is respected,
receiving kind touch without compulsion,
going out into the world without believing that everyone can see the history.
The body does not need to become perfect in order to become a home.
It needs to be allowed to belong to the person.
Sexual abuse attempts to make the body an object of another person’s will. Shame may later continue the same act by making the body an object of one’s own disgust.
The way back begins when this pattern is broken.
Not by denying what happened.
Not by demanding love for the body before such love is possible.
But by saying:
This body has been violated.
It bears the marks of it.
Even so, it is not unclean.
It is mine.
Sexual abuse attempts to make the body an object of another person’s will. Shame may later continue the same act by making the body an object of one’s own disgust.
The way back begins when this pattern is broken.
This essay was developed through a new reading of the focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews that formed the foundation of my doctoral dissertation, A Study of Shame (2009). The text is part of the series Conversations About Shame and was written in conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT.
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