We Can't Look Past Alice Munro's Complicity In Her Daughter's Sexual Abuse

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it,” as written by Alice Munro. Are these mere words or did she overlook the disarray her daughter, Skinner, would face with her traumatic childhood and her mother’s silence on it? 

Alice Munro's Daughter's Revelation Is Devastating, But Is It Surprising?

Did Alice Munro read Russian author Nabokov’s Lolita? I wonder; because if she read it, did she feel the book in her blood? How could she look away at the severity of such a hedonistic sexual fantasy that is fulfilled at the price of underage girls and in her case, her own daughter?

I am left wondering if she felt guilty on her last day for this unforgivable act because a mother loses all her credibility if she is an accomplice to any kind of sexual abuse on her children and she not disinfecting the entire environment at home. Even if it means letting go of the partner or husband if found guilty. 

Nobel laureate, Munro's work was empathetic towards women. But today, this is questionable with the recent revelation, of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner’s abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Skinner said that her step-father, who was in his 50s, started sexually assaulting her when she was only nine years of age, and Munro continued to stay with him even after learning of the abuse. 

Skinner isn’t the first one to open up about toxic parenting. There is a list of celebrities who have spoken up about their dysfunctional relationships with their parents. From Adele, Kate Hudson, Eminem, Drew Barrymore and many more who opened up about how the sunlight never reached them
as they were raised by parents who were okay with abandoning them when they were little. 

Skinner’s case makes one wonder about the loss of the ideal relationship between a mother and her daughter, which is like a fresh loaf out of the oven, all warm and soft. Girls sleep snuggling in their mother’s arms. This humongous aberration of the ideal versus the ugly reality of the mother living with a paedophile who has a primary sexual interest in prepubescent children. How do such mothers feel about themselves with the perpetrator? Can they ever reconcile? The questions that arise are where was the female camaraderie and confessions between Munro and her little daughter? 

Every child needs their parents to protect them. In the case of a daughter, the mother is the anchor. So, for girls like Skinner, the scar of sexual abuse is a lifelong scar. This is something that most survivors learn to deal with as they lose the best years of their youth navigating this complexity and finding it enormously difficult to forge secure and healthy relationships for the future. 

Unfortunately, the scale in this is again titled towards more daughters than sons who are silenced if the perpetrator is in the family. This is done to keep up with the facade of family reputation and in many cases the ease of the parents in continuing the family structure, while conveniently overlooking the distressed child.

A recent NCRB data reveals that in India child rape cases, encompassing all forms of penetrative assaults, have registered a rise of 96 percent from 2016 to 2022. The awareness is slowly increasing and parents are coming forth to register cases, but one knows considering the nature of this crime, many go unreported. But shining the torchlight on these dark crimes is a must, to counter these abusers who often get away with only being subjected to an arsenal of an argument within the closed walls of their homes. They must be called out and shamed, exactly as Skinner has done.

Views expressed are the author's own.

Mohua Chinappa is a poet, and author. She runs two podcasts, The Mohua Show and The Literature Lounge. She is part of the award-winning London-based think tank called Bridge India.