Ruth Beecher

Overview

Biography

Historian and applied researcher. My current project focuses on the histories of abuse, trauma and recovery from survivor and practitioner perspectives (Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales 1950s to present). Between 2018 and 2024, I investigated the role of health professionals and feminist survivor activists in relation to early intervention in child sexual abuse in Britain, 1970-2000, using archival research and new oral histories. My research and teaching interests include the history of British and American health and social care, with an emphasis on the history of children and families, the history of the professions and the history and politics of gender, sexuality and sexual violence.

I am co-chair of the international Challenging Research Network, a group of researchers and academics who work in complex, emotionally demanding, and politically charged research territories. 

I am the founder and a trustee of the heritage charity Úna Gan a Gúna: Irish Women’s Oral History Collective. This is a feminist collective dedicated to ensuring that the memories, experiences, and lives of Irish and diaspora women are documented and preserved. Ireland’s history has traditionally focused on the lives of men, Úna seeks to make it richer and fuller by gathering, preserving and sharing women’s stories.

Prior to 2018, I was a leader in local government, I programme managed local policy initiatives and translated national policy into successful practice on the ground, both in children’s services and working across into other sectors particularly housing, health and employment.

Highlights

• My book will be published in April 2025 by Palgrave Macmillan.  It is an innovative history of community health practitioners’ responses to the seemingly intractable problem of men (and on rare occasions, women) sexually abusing children within the private family home. It is situated within a social history of the development of British community-based health professions in the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival research and newly gathered in-depth oral history interviews, the monograph argues that expectations placed upon community-based doctors, nurses and mental health staff since the 1980s in relation to predicting and preventing the sexual abuse of children by men they know are incongruous. Beneath a surface acquiescence to the need to protect children from such abuse or to intervene early lie cultural, social and structural barriers that prevent its fulfilment. The book is a first in specifically interrogating the recent history of the role of community health practitioners within the modern 'child protection workforce', and contributes to growing scholarship on the history of emotions in the medical professions.
  

  Community Health Practitioners and Child Sexual Abuse in the Family, 1970s-2010s

• Read this special issue on perpetrators of sexual violence: Ruth Beecher & Stephanie Wright, 'Historicising the perpetrators of sexual violence: global perspectives from the modern world,' Women's History Review (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2197790

• Read my article about the challenges health visitors, GPs and other community-based health practitioners have faced in relation to responding to child sexual abuse: Ruth Beecher, 'Children, Sexual Abuse and the Emotions of the Community Health Practitioner in England and Wales, 1970-2000,' Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2023), jrad024 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad024

Qualifications

• PhD, University of London, 2015
• Masters in Applied Research, University of Sheffield, 2001
• BA (Hons), University of London, 1997

Web profiles

• Úna Gan a Gúna: Irish Women's Digital History Project

Research

Research overview

Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is not an illness or a physical wound. And yet recovery is spoken about in a language borrowed from medicine, we seek to ‘heal wounds’ and ‘repair damage.’ The language of trauma now dominates public services, emphasising psychological recovery and ignoring other forms of social support that individuals need to achieve emotional and physical equilibrium. In research, measuring the clinical efficacy of specific treatments is often favoured while survivors’ needs are ignored. They tell us that their recovery is frequently hindered rather than helped by medical and social welfare interventions. They testify to the fact that their views are given less credence, their ‘stories’ are generalised across time, place and identity. The experiences of the minoritized and structural inequalities are ignored.

But we can learn from our past. This Wellcome-funded project will produce the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from CSA in the second half of twentieth century Britain and Ireland. The research plan has been co-produced with survivor and practitioner partners, Survivors’ Voices, Survivors’ in Transition, The Flying Child CIC and the Association of Child Protection Professionals and their input will be at the heart of the project across the four years. The project will run in line with the Survivors’ Charter principles, it will prioritise survivor experiences and offer a challenge to medical and psychiatric expertise on what makes a ‘good recovery’ or supports individuals to live with the aftermaths. The team will also start the process of working with survivors to build a Survivors' Archive of Recovery Exhibition to celebrate survival, recognise survivors’ knowledge, activism and historical significance; and to promote discussion in the wider society.

The project will use mixed methods: fieldwork alongside survivor participants to understand what living with the aftereffects of abuse means to them, observing practitioners who work across a broad range of ‘helping’ services, and recording new oral histories with survivors and practitioners. We aim to broadens the lens beyond medication or therapy to other supports, e.g. education, financial stability, spirituality, relationships, play, creativity.

Research clusters and groups

• Conflict and violence
• Difference, race and inequality
• Mind and Body
• Public history

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

I have previously convened American History since 1600 and Popular Culture in American History as an Associate Lecturer in American History, at Birkbeck (between 2008/9 and 2011/12, and 2015/16).

Teaching modules

• Theorising Gender (FDGD009S7)
• Critical Entanglements and Methods in the Medical Humanities (SSHC483S7)

Publications