When Harm Becomes Background Noise 

There is something deeply disturbing about the way sexual violation is sometimes spoken about as if it is “just life”, a texture of growing up, background noise, or an anecdote.

Normalising it does not mean people are lying; it simply makes things palatable enough for us all to get on with our daily lives undisturbed.

Humour as a Mask for Violation 

In her memoir This Much Is True, Miriam Margolyes recounts early sexual experiences with a tone that is striking not for what is said, but for how lightly she addresses it. Encounters that, by any contemporary safeguarding standard, would now be recognised as abuse are narrated with humour, irreverence, and even the kind of warmth and candour she has become known for.

The Cultural Conditioning of Silence 

She writes of older men being “experienced gropers – but not scary”, of sexualised attention and actions in adolescence shaped by peer pressure, and of countless boundary violations reframed as character-building or simply “part of life”. What is most unsettling is not the content itself, but the lack of weight she has given to it, and that lack of weight is by no means neutral; it reflects cultural conditioning and, perhaps, a way of offloading a level of lived experience that has never been fully named, or even recognised as such.

Dissociation and Survival in Plain Sight 

This is what happens when a society teaches people, especially young girls and women, that to survive, you must either stay silent or make what happened to you palatable, and to make it palatable, you must make it smaller.

Although Margolyes’ account is presented as storytelling, as anecdote and colour to her life, sexual assault is not something to be laughed at or absorbed as part of the backdrop. What sits beneath the humour and bluntness is something far more complex: a form of dissociation, an acceptance that this was ‘simply part of life’, ‘the way things were.’

What Survival Really Looks Like 

For those of us who have lived through sexual trauma, there is often a split that occurs, a distancing from the experience, which results in pushing it down to ‘just get on with life’, reframing what happened, reconsidering it, and retelling it in ways that make it easier to carry. This is not because the events were harmless, but because fully feeling them would be overwhelming to the point of self-destruction.

Survival rarely presents itself in the ways people expect it to, either. It does not always look like fear but often manifests as guilt, self-blame, detachment, avoidance, or simply carrying on, and in this case, it is expressed through humour.

Adaptation Is Not Freedom 

Reading Margolyes’ account through that lens, the tone becomes less shocking and more recognisable. Perhaps she believes she was liberated, or that women today have become oversensitive with the women’s rights movement, but what it reflects is adaptation: fitting in, not making a fuss, navigating expectations, and finding a way to exist within the boundaries set around her, including those shaped by her Jewish identity and environment.

Women have always adapted to risk. Long before we had the language of consent, women were managing male behaviour in ways that prioritised survival, whether through deflecting unwanted attention, complying as the “good girl” or “good little woman”, ignoring it as simply part of a career path, or engaging in strategic appeasement. These were not expressions of freedom, but responses to environments where boundaries were not reliably respected and/or believed, and where women often operated within a constrained sense of choice.

The Cost of Minimising Harm 

What Margolyes describes is not a series of carefree decisions, but socially conditioned navigation, a way of fitting in, getting ahead, and protecting oneself.

Rather than simply storytelling, what emerges is dissociation rendered socially acceptable, and I want to be honest about my response to that, because it has not been neutral. There has been a growing sense of anger, not abstract or theoretical, but something quieter and more persistent. I recognise the costs incurred to minimise what happened to survive it, and what happens when minimisation is echoed back at us by others.

I know the impact sexual assault has on the nervous system, the body, and the psyche, and I know how we adapt to protect ourselves, whether through withdrawal, overwork, avoidance, or reshaping ourselves to reduce risk. I also know what it costs when others minimise it for you, when friends, family, institutions, communities, and even justice systems choose the version of events that is easier to hear, and empty of justice.

When Communities Choose Comfort Over Truth 

Addressing this is not about the past, because this pattern continues to play out across society now. Women are still being required to translate their harm into acceptable language, or defensible narratives, before they are believed, and survivors are still being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to soften their words so that others can remain comfortable, and adapt their style of dress and behaviour.

In some cases, my own included, that same cultural discomfort with “too much truth” leads directly to survivors needing video evidence, not being under the influence of alcohol or drugs (taken willingly or not). These aspects of ‘proof’ and reliability lead to survivors being doubted, scrutinised, sidelined, and even placed under suspicion, because somewhere along the line, we have decided that it is more important not to unsettle the room than to confront what actually happened within it.

“Inclusive” Spaces and the Avoidance of Discomfort 

We see this in so-called “inclusive” spaces, where the avoidance of uncomfortable truths or opinions is framed as safeguarding, and where civility is used to sidestep reality, yet avoiding issues such as sexual violence does not prevent harm; it allows it to continue.

In cases such as Gisèle Pelicot, the world has been forced to confront what happens when consent is not respected, and violations are hidden in plain sight. Yet even here, questions remain about what it means to process such experiences under constant public scrutiny. When life continues at pace, when legal processes, media attention, and personal upheaval collide, it is difficult to know whether there has been space for genuine processing, or whether dissociation is once again playing its role in holding everything together.

Trauma Does Not Disappear, It Waits 

Trauma does not resolve simply because life moves forward; it is often delayed, stored, buried deeply, and carried within the body, and when it resurfaces, it rarely does so gently. It returns in waves, and like grief, it resurfaces through memory, sensation, and moments that disrupt the illusion of normality, and this is the part we do not speak about enough: the aftermath, the unravelling, the long and often invisible process of making sense of what has been lived through – whether we were conscious to it or not.

This is why composure, distance, and even strength in the moment cannot be taken as resolution, because strength at the time does not remove the possibility of collapse later. If that collapse comes, it is not weakness, but a continuation of the body’s attempt to process and heal what has been endured.

Testimonies such as those from Charlotte Nichols also reveal how often distress is visible long before it is understood, as people notice, suspect, collude in gossip, but do not ask. It is within that gap, between observation and acknowledgement, that harm deepens – and isolates the victims.

Normalisation as a Social Permission Structure 

Margolyes’ memoir, theatrical as it is, ultimately reveals something far broader about how society determines what constitutes “real” harm and what can be dismissed or laughed away, and that is something I am struggling to accept.

I have lived the consequences of a culture that minimises rather than confronts, a society that questions the survivor rather than examining the environment, and I know I am not alone in that experience. While there is growing awareness and willingness to challenge injustice, we are still operating within a culture that avoids discomfort so thoroughly that truth itself becomes negotiable.

Survival Is Not Consent 

What Margolyes’ memoir exposes, whether intentionally or not, is not just personal history, but the wider social permission structure around sexual harm, how it is softened, reframed, and made tolerable enough to ignore. A phrase such as “experienced groper – but not scary” reveals how low the bar has been set, how much has been tolerated, and how carefully women have had to navigate behaviour that was never truly acceptable.

This is not about judging how women have survived, but it does require us to stop romanticising those survival strategies, because survival has never been consent, navigating, adapting or pre-emptive behaviour is not freedom, and detachment is certainly not liberation.

The question we are left with is whether we are genuinely moving forward, or simply changing the language while leaving the underlying dynamics untouched – unlike the lives that are destroyed in the process. We need to ask whether we are raising generations who understand boundaries, who respect “no” without negotiation, and who do not require young girls and women to adapt in order to remain safe, or whether we are still, quietly, expecting females to manage male behaviour.

The Dangerous Consequence of Laughing at Harm 

Because none of this is accidental; it is part of a system that sustains itself through avoidance, minimisation, reframing, and normalisation, and when we are taught to laugh at violation, we begin to lose the ability to recognise it clearly.

That loss is dangerous because it feeds directly into the systems that require survivors to prove not only what happened to them, but whether it was serious enough to be named, and whether their response was acceptable enough to be believed.

We should not be questioning their appearance, their tone or their chosen lifestyles.

We should be questioning what we have collectively decided is not serious enough to name, resolve… and why.