Shawnie

Lifestyle

Fashion

Culture

Books

Shawnie

By Ed Trewavas Tindal Street Press

Reviewed by Nick Atkinson

An emotionally charged journey through one girl’s devastating experience of sexual abuse.

Shawnie is an overweight and mentally vulnerable girl of thirteen, surviving in a deprived estate of inner city Bristol. Surviving is the key word when describing this tragic, emotionally awakening and psychologically testing tale of abuse, naivety and the grotesque subtext of abuse cascading through the life of a true innocent.

Starved of emotional love and parental affection, Shawnie exists in a microcosmic world terrible enough to frighten any suburbanite into staying away from true inner city living forever. Sexually abused by her father, her stepfather, her stepfather’s friends and her brother, Shawnie is conditioned to accept a lifestyle of enforced and painfully regular male gratification as a substitute for genuine paternal care.

Shawnie’s story is told from the rotating point of view of members of her nuclear

family - mother,brother, step-father, father and her own – this is an attempt by the author to explain the cause and effect of psychological and sexual abuse from the point of view of all the parties involved in such a damaging scenario. This format powerfully paints a vivid picture of Shawnie’s situation and at times has you so immersed in attempting to deconstruct the thought process of these serial abusers that you have to put the book down just to take it all in and have a breather. Written in a coarse Bristolian dialect that once you really tune into thrusts you deeply into some very dark places, this is a powerful text and a very important text. People need to understand the complexities of an area of abuse that ruins the lives of so many voiceless people in the world and books like Shawnie put the raw facts into a medium digestible - although it may not stay down long.

As much as I would find it difficult to enthusiastically recommend Shawnie to anybody, people should read this and books like it as part of an important process of self-education. Shawnie is a brave and important publication but certainly not for the faint-hearted or those looking for a tale of hope.