| In the wake of a recent series of high-profile Incidents, child abuse and youth violence are Increasingly seen as urgent social problems in both Japan and the United States. This dissertation explores the ways in which these problems are understood, manufactured, represented, and simultaneously hidden from view in contemporary American and Japanese every day life and popular culture. Central to this study are two overarching questions: how traumatic stories are both difficult to tell and crucial to survival and recovery and how youth violence is often disassociated from its traumatic origins in general public discourse. Through sustained readings of fictional and popular representations of child abuse and youth violence and analyses of actual cases, this dissertation explores the obstacles facing those who attempt to communicate traumatic experience and offers an argument for seeing youth violence as inextricably linked to childhood trauma. Finally, this study critiques a wide array of ensconced attitudes, beliefs, and biases that mistakenly seek to locate the origins of child abuse and youth violence in a particular class, culture, or even language. |
