Meet the Duggars: The Reproduction of Gender Privilege in the Popular Construction of Sibling Sexual Abuse

Sibling sexual abuse a nefarious harm that researchers suspect occurs for often than any other form of child sexual abuse, and is very rarely reported to authorities. On May 19th 2015, allegations of sexual abuse by Joshua Duggar against four of his younger sisters and a female babysitter during 2002 and 2003, were made public knowledge by the tabloid InTouch. In response to the public outcry, parents Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar sat for an interview on June 3rd 2015, in their family home with Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly. Statements made by The Duggars about sibling sexual abuse are optimal data to examine, as they are in the public domain and available to analyze systematically. Their hyper-visibility makes their constructions of the abusive behavior and their reactions to the abuse, tools of interpretation that others can rely upon in the event that their family is experiencing this type of abuse.

Using a multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis (Machin and Mayr 2012), this thesis analyzes both the linguistic as well as the visual features of interviews with The Duggars, explicating the ways in which the stories they tell signify broader discourses about gender, power and sibling sexual abuse. Informed by criminological theories on harm and the continuation of harm, my findings support the notion that The Duggar interviews do in fact have the potential to perpetuate the myth that sibling sexual abuse is benign, and even more, excuse sibling sexual abuse as normative and exploratory, reinforcing those gender ideologies.