3: savilian spaces

There is in operation a dark version of the layering of space. Despite the queer and feminist deterritorialisations that an understanding of the relations between spatial layers can nurture and provoke, there are also reactionary reterritorialisations of such spaces, where the transitions and overlaps between the layers are exploited to make new spaces of violence, exploitation, threat and misery. This dark layering operates less across defined battlefields or in secret places, but more often alongside ostensibly benign and neutral spaces.

In the recent revelations about the abuse of vulnerable people, mostly young and mostly female, by celebrities, politicians and organised gangs in the UK, accounts of this abuse often describe a particular kind of space of abuse; a space that seems to have gone missing, become invisible or meaningless, that seems to have been largely unacknowledged in public, legal or academic discourses but to have been consistently exploited semi-publicly/semi-privately by abusers, both individual and organised, active in different class and cultural milieus.

In the case of the abuses of young women in Rotherham and other English cities, this Savilian space of abuse lies in a particular relation to family, ‘community’ and small businesses, in the same way as it has, in other instances, lain in a similar relation to the entertainment industry, churches, local and national state bureaucracies, hospitals, psychiatric wards and special schools. These Savilian places of abuse are often located somewhere between private and public space. They are places to which access is negotiated; though not public places they are usually ‘known’ to, even administered by, the institutions, families and communities the abusers operate within. These are not places of confinement or concealment, nor are they clandestine or taboo, covert or transgressive. They are inversions or inlets of semi-informal and semi-official space: dressing rooms, offices, private rooms on wards, curtained beds,