Anecdotes, gossip, and hearsay are not sources in a scholarly sense. However, we should not entirely dismiss or ignore that they may play a role in informal knowledge production that can shape researchers’ relations to their subjects— for better or worse.
As researchers looking into the politics of family secrecy in 20th century Denmark, our group would often find information on family secrets in indirect ways: in the absence of a documentation that should have been there, in the traces of hidden personal stories submerged in archival files or in the memories and testimonies of individuals who uncovered a secret in their own family histories. Secrets leave traces. Acts of concealment create reproducible knowledge that may soundly inform scholarship. However, practices of secrecy within families may also contain hearsay, gossip, perhaps even lies. How should we approach this kind of informal, and unverifiable, knowledge?
Gossip reflects power dynamics in a family and the value of a given information in the community. It may tell us less about the person/secret that is the target of the gossip, but more about the person telling and their possible motivation. Despite this information value, gossip is highly problematic as a source. Apart from the difficulty of verifying gossip, there will just be too many ethical transgressions involved in most cases. For example, in my own sub-project on family secrets emerging from the German occupation of Denmark, I had a strange encounter with a member of the public who repeatedly emailed me about not his own, but his friend’s past. He claimed that his friend had been a member of the Danish national socialist youth movement and insisted I should talk to him. Despite my clear rejection of this proposal, he kept following up for over a year. The appeal of the gossip he believed himself in a position to share appears to have been too strong.
The appeal of anecdotal information, broadly conceived, cuts both ways. While I had to block unethical revelations from others as in the example above, I had to also stop myself from relying on hearsay. Working with personal testimonies and memories about a family secret commonly involves people or events beyond the given informants’ own experiences. As official information on, for example, adoption practices around children born to Danish women and German soldiers during the WWII occupation is extremely limited, experiences of the adoptees themselves are one of the few available sources. I found myself wishing I could use what I heard from interviewees about certain institutions even though in the end I had to admit to myself I could not. Even if these insights were true and I trusted my informants, I simply could not provide the necessary backing.
Despite all these clear limitations, I also experienced that anecdotal information can have a productive potential for scholarship too. Occasionally an anecdote may change your perspective in ways you cannot take back. This new knowledge then alters how you see and understand the evidence you have, even though the source for this new perspective remains anecdotal. When I was working on the transnational adoption history of biracial children, born to African American soldiers and German women in 1960s Denmark, I came across the term ‘mulatto’. Biracial adoptees at the time were called ‘mulatto children,’ which I primarily read as a signifier of their racial difference from ‘white’ Danes. Over lunch with a friend, she mentioned her mother went to school with some of these children and that it was important for them to call them ‘mulattos’ to indicate they were ‘part-white.’
This may be a false memory. I cannot verify whether my friends’ mother’s views represent a then wide-spread attitude toward the ‘mulatto’ children and make this a historical argument either. But this information has changed my analytical perspective on the possible valuations of hiding/highlighting ‘Germanness’ as a construction of ethno-racial difference in the adoptee testimonies I work with. One may call incidents like this serendipity or an inspiration scholars depart from. But it was also a source of knowledge. If we accept the latter view, then we need perhaps a broader discussion on the criteria for scholarly engagement with anecdotes that would enable us to distinguish and acknowledge cases that have informed our own work in ethically sound and productive ways.
During the final 2020 presidential debate, Donald J. Trump brought up the son of his opponent, Joe Biden. Once again, Trump accused Hunter Biden of wrongdoings in Ukraine and China and then alluded to Hunter’s bouts with addiction. Biden responded to the allegations by declaring, “It’s not about his family and my family.” Pointing into the camera to engage the 14 million viewers, he added, “it’s about your family.”
Yet, in America, politicians’ families are always on the ballot. Candidates for higher office bring their spouses, children, siblings, and parents to rallies, proudly displaying picture-perfect families for the media to broadcast. In the so-called biographical index used to forecast the outcome of an election, “Adopted children,” “Divorce,” “Loss of children,” and “Marriage” are important variables that can work either for or against a contender. The candidate’s family can be a trump or a major disadvantage.
The fact that voters give such weight to the families of their representatives reveals a great deal about the status of the family in contemporary culture. The family, we seem to believe, carries a deeper truth about the moral character of a person, and how an individual acts front stage is ultimately less illuminating than how they behave backstage in their intimate circles. Hence, digging deeply into family secrets is supposedly a way to determine whether an individual is fit for office.
American historian John R. Gillis has argued that we all have two different kinds of families: the families we live by and the families we live with. The families we live by are loving, supportive, and protective; they are the mythical and idealized ones we present to the world.[1] Much of the time, however, the real-life families we live with are a lot less idyllic. They tend to be marked by power struggles, betrayals, jealousy, suffocating expectations, and sometimes by violence and abuse. In order for a candidate to be successful, he or she needs to engage in careful knowledge management in order to convince the public that there is certain degree of continuity between the two incarnations of the family.
This can be somewhat challenging. With her bestselling exposé, Too Much and Never Enough, published in the summer of 2020, Donald Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, made sure that the president’s family life, much like Biden’s, was publicly vetted. Rather than an examination of the president’s actions in service of the nation, the biography presented revelations of personal transgressions and the unfolding of what she called a “malignantly dysfunctional family.” The American president supposedly grew up in a home run by a self-absorbed, chronically ill mother and an emotionally detached patriarch. As a result of these unhealthy family dynamics, Mary L. Trump writes, her uncle now suffers from a number of “pathologies,” including a diet-coke induced sleeping disorder, narcissism, and sociopathy.
The book’s subtitle– How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man – underlines the author’s overarching claim that faulty family dynamics produced a self-aggrandizing global threat. Mary L. Trump’s own father, having grown up in the same home, turned his destructive behavior inward as he drank himself to death at the age of 42. Mary L. Trump, in short, communicates a story ripe with moral and social grime – substance abuse, misogyny, and fraud – of the current president of the United States, somewhat at odds with the image the president himself likes to project of a beautiful and successful family.
Despite attempts to stop its publication, the book reached the stands just in time for the Republican National Convention. Critics commended the author for delivering “John Bolton-quality revelations, but about Trump’s family”, and for confronting the “sanitized version of the family myth”. The book climbed the charts, selling almost a million copies on its first day of sales, and was soon on top of the hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, testifying to our apparently insatiable desire for behind-the-scenes information about the family life of the commander-in-chief.
Such airing of the dirty laundry of a politician is no novelty. The past decades offer numerous examples. Think, for instance, of President George W. Bush who had to publicly excuse his twin daughters after they had been cited by Texas police for underage drinking. A former staffer later stated that keeping Jenna and Barbara Bush’s mischievous behavior under wraps was a “a secret service nightmare”. The political career of John Edwards, former U.S. senator and vice-presidential nominee, was severely damaged when it was revealed in 2007 and 2008 that he had had an extramarital affair and even fathered a child outside marriage. The affair, which Edwards had reluctantly admitted to after months of denial, shocked many as his wife had just been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.
The pressure for transparency in the U.S. electoral process has also made it comme il faut over the past 30 years for candidates to produce a bill of health. The challenge to publicize tax returns has a slighter longer history that harkens back to president Nixon in the early 1970s. Around the same time, the media attention surrounding the private lives of politicians increased immensely. The public push for intimate insights was justified by a perceived need to provide the American people with enough background information that they never again elect “a crook.”
To be sure, some disclosures are entirely intentional and even put proactively to use in a candidate’s favor. Hillary Clinton, whose fraught family life had long been a matter of controversy, thus used memoirs to repair the public image of her intimate relationships. Her first memoir from 2005 gives an effectively edited glimpse into the Clinton couple’s attempts to salvage their marriage following a very public process on her husband’s extramarital affair and sexual harassment case. Her second memoir published right before she announced her bid for the 2016 election highlights other aspects of her family history, emphasizing her ties to her mother as well as to her daughter and newly born granddaughter. As this indicates, politicians’ family lives need perhaps not be perfect. We might even relish the feeling of familiarity that comes with knowing that they, too, experience personal problems. It enables us to identify with them. But they must also demonstrate the ability to overcome difficulties, to find nurture in healthy relationships, to mend broken bonds, and to reconstruct a loving family story.
The “who would you rather have a beer with”-question has long been considered the ultimate test of the folksiness of a politician. This gives candidates an impetus to disclose certain aspects of their personal history, while avoiding the revelation of others. Besides the opportunity to sell one’s own version of the family story, autobiographies come with a promise of behind-the-scenes revelations. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel noted back in 1906, information that comes with the stamp of confidentiality appears as a priori more valuable than that which is widely accessible.[2] Politicians often skillfully take advantage of this, giving voters a peek into their private lives by posting intimate family pictures, supposedly less curated than official photos, on social media. Just as with other acts that serve to demonstrate commonality – such as meet-and-greets or publicly eating fast food – these can potentially be converted to trust and a sense of intimacy with the constituents.
“With an energy unique to this age,” John Gillis pointed out in 1996, “we research, document, photograph, videotape, and narrate family in public ways that earlier generations would have found quite embarrassing and totally unnecessary.[3] Since then, the impulse to convey and disclose what was previously considered private has only increased. Today, family life figures as the proper manifestation of an individual’s identity, a litmus test of their moral compass, and a signpost of their likeability.
[1] John R. Gillis: A World of Their Own Making. Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values, Harvard University Press, 1996.
[2] Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 11, no. 4, 1906, pp. 441-498.
[3] John R. Gillis: A World of Their Own Making, xvi.
In her famous work Dust: Archive and the Cultural History (2001), Carolyn Steedman stated that “the Historian who goes to the Archive must always be an unintended reader, will always read that which was never intended for his or her eyes.” (Steedman 2001: 75). The fact that we are the unintended readers have ethical consequences, especially when the sources concern experiences of sensitive personal matters. In Sweden, when accumulating such sources from an archive, access will be regulated by rules enforced by law or by the archive.[1] In order to safeguard the integrity of the historical subjects the archive might allow restricted access to sources, for example by redacting any personal information in the data made available to the researcher. However, when using private collections that are not stored in an archive, no professional gatekeeper is present to safeguard the integrity of the historical subjects. Instead we must rely on our own ethical judgements. Moreover, in several countries, ethical vetting boards now also have to approve of research projects on sensitive matters that involve individual historical – though possibly still living – actors. But what if the historian’s ethical judgement conflicts with the ethical vetting board’s? What happens to historical research if we adjust our knowledge interests towards queries and sources ethical vetting boards are likely to approve? In this blog post we discuss two cases from Sweden where the Regional Ethical Vetting Board at Linköping University has evaluated two research projects, which have dealt with letters in private collections. The respective decision processes illustrate the dilemmas and problems that the process of ethical vetting might pose to historians.
According to the Swedish Ethical Review Act, any research that contains sensitive personal information about individuals must be approved by an Ethical Vetting Board (§ 3 SFS 2003:460), which in turn bases its decision on whether the risks the research poses for research subjects’ health, safety and personal integrity are outweighed by the research project’s scientific value (§ 9). If the research involves physical intervention, or if it is conducted by a method that either affects the individual physically or mentally, or entails an obvious risk of harming the individual physically or mentally, informed consent from the individual is required (§4, §16-22). The definition of sensitive personal information was given by the Personal Records Act (SFS 1988:204) until May 25 2018, then replaced by the European union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Both legislations define sensitive personal information as racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, membership of a trade union, health or a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.[2] Consequently, the introduction of GDPR did not change much for Swedish scholars in this regard. However, as the two case studies below show, it is important that historians are proactive and challenge the premises for what ethically sound research entails, as ethical regulations are rooted in medicine and not in the history discipline (Colnerud 2014).[3]
The first case – Children’s rights in society
(BRIS)
Our first case concerns letters from children to the Swedish child rights organization BRIS (Children’s rights in society). This organization was founded in 1971 as a reaction against cases of physical child abuse in Sweden. BRIS was involved in the drafting of the corporal punishment ban, enforced in 1979 as the first corporal punishment ban in the world. However, BRIS is more famous for its Kids’ helpline, which the organization established in 1980. Through the helpline (nowadays not only by phone, but also email and chat) BRIS has become an important channel for children’s voices. The organization also advocates children’s rights in the Swedish public. By cataloguing the issues children bring to the fore when they contact the helpline, BRIS has developed a system for representing children’s voices.
When we visited BRIS’
central office in 2016 looking for data for a research project, we came across a
bunch of letters written by children in the 1970s and early 80s to one of BRIS’
founders – the famous children’s literature author Gunnel Linde. We quickly
realized that this was an important finding: By these letters we would be able
to identify what issues children themselves thought would be important for BRIS
to be aware of before the Kids’ helpline was even established. Inasmuch as the
letters may have concerned individual children’s problems and calls for help,
the letters may also contain children’s views on what issues a child rights
organization ought to engage in. As BRIS is an organization of adults working
for children it is important from a child studies scholar point of view to critically
discuss how children’s voices are represented.
BRIS has not donated
their documents to any archive. All material is stored at the central office in
Stockholm. By the first time we visited BRIS, the material was stored in the
basement, together with old furniture and boxes of campaign material. Access to
the letters demanded BRIS’ permission as well as their assistance to let us in
in the storage room. However, access is also regulated by the ethical legislation
we must follow as researchers.
The ethical
regulations’ emphasis on informed consent poses challenges to historians. In
our case the letters were written decades ago (40 years back), and they were
often signed with the child’s first name only. In our application to the
Regional Ethical Vetting Board we argued that while the letters may contain
sensitive personal information, the probability of being able to identify any
individual in the material was quite limited and informed consent therefore was
a) not justified, and b) impossible to obtain. We stressed that we would not disclose
any information that could be connected to any individual in our publications,
and that we were interested in finding out which themes were mentioned in the
letters – not in how individual children described their problems. However, the
Regional Ethical Vetting Board was not persuaded by our arguments. They asked
us to complement our application reflecting on the following questions:
The researchers should reflect on the risk that the now adult research subjects can suffer mental harm by knowing that their letters with sensitive issues have been studied by researchers, without their consent […] The researchers should reflect on how children’s and young people’s confidence in BRIS can be affected in the future if it becomes known that researchers have had access to children’s and young people’s letters without their consent, even if the letters are anonymized.
These remarks implied
that informed consent was the only way forward. This was impossible for us –
the letters did simply not contain enough information to identify each writer so
we could contact them and ask if they were ok with us taking part of their
letters. Moreover, had we been able to identify a couple of individuals and
contacted them, we would have risked harming their integrity by disclosing that
we knew that they had written letters to BRIS 40 years back. We thus found
ourselves caught in a catch 22-situation.
The second question indicated
that the Regional Ethical Vetting Board treated BRIS as research subject that
required similar ethical considerations as research on any living human. If we got
access to the letters, this might harm BRIS’ future reputation amongst children,
the Ethical Vetting Board speculated. The fact that BRIS had given us access
and that they were interested in our research was apparently irrelevant. Despite
our efforts to clarify our ethical reflections around the issue, the Regional
Ethical Vetting Board turned down our application for ethical approval arguing
that “the scientific value of the research does not outweigh the risks that the
project might entail for the research subjects’ health, safety and integrity”
with reference to § 9 of the Ethical Review Act. Moreover, the Regional Vetting
Board argued that no such research was allowed without informed consent from
the research subjects.
If this reject
decision had set precedence for the handling of historical letters with
sensitive information, this would have endangered any future attempt by historians
to access written records of past experiences in private collections. However,
we appealed against the decision to the Central Ethical Vetting Board, and eventually
got approval. The Central Board did not find that § 4 was applicable to our
project, and therefore informed consent was not required. But by the time we received
the approval, the project period was nearly up, and we did not have time to study
the letters.
The second case – the children’s hotels
Korsnäsverkens Barnpensionat Kärradal
Our second case deals
with letters that a journalist received after a radio broadcast about so-called
children’s hotels (Sw barnpensionat)
in the 1990s. This collection of letters, stored in the journalist’s home, were
written by adults with childhood experiences of being sent away to such
children’s hotels. For a research project in which we aim to investigate private
out-of-home care arrangements, these letters contain very valuable information.
The journalist had promised us access to the letters. However, as the letters may
contain sensitive personal information about the authors, we sought ethical
approval for this project as well – this time after the enforcement of GDPR in
2018. Once again, we argued that seeking informed consent from people who wrote
these letters 20 years ago would not be possible due to incomplete information
about full names, addresses etc. We also emphasized the risk of interfering with
integrity if we contact people asking them for their consent to read their
letters. Instead, we suggested that we would anonymize the letters before
analyzing them. However, as the letters are stored in a private home, the
anonymization cannot be carried out at site. The letters must be transferred to
the university first. Moreover, since the anonymization will be conducted by us
– the researchers – a total anonymization is not possible. If the letters had
been stored in an archive, the anonymization would have been carried out by
professional archivists before handling the data over to researchers. But
private collections do not come with such facilities.
This time the Regional
Ethical Vetting Board approved our application. It is of course satisfying that
the vetting board found our argumentation sufficient to safeguard the ethical
principles, but it is fascinating that similar ethical dilemmas (private
collections of letters with sensitive personal information where informed
consent is difficult to achieve) have been assessed quite differently by the
same regional vetting board.
Is anonymization an ethical solution?
The ethical dilemmas historians
face cannot be reduced to informed consent or anonymization (Vehkalahti 2016). In
the second project where we adjusted our data collection towards anonymization
in order to satisfy the principles that guide the Ethical Vetting Board, one might
reasonably question whether anonymization is the most ethically accurate
response. People who listened to the radio broadcast about the children’s
hotels, and then wrote about their own experiences of having resided in such a
place and sent it to a journalist may not have wished for anonymity. In fact,
our experiences from addressing difficult life narratives in history have
demonstrated that people often want to have their narratives acknowledged. By
anonymizing the historical subjects, the archive our research project will create
will be full of anonymous voices, not individuals. Those who devoted time to
write down their narratives on which our research depends will never earn the credit
they deserve.
So how can letters
intended for someone else be used in research projects that require
anonymization in order to address ethical principles, while at the same time
creating another dilemma: that people’s personal narratives become stripped
from everything that is personal? Or put differently: Researchers working with
historical data need to be attentive to how ethical regulation created with
medicine in focus, might result in new ethical dilemmas.
References:
Colnerud, G. (2014). “Ethical
dilemmas in research in relation to ethical review: An empirical study” in Research Ethics, Vol. 10 Issue 4,
238-253.
Steedman, C. (2001). Dust. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Vehkalahti, K. (2016).
Dusting the archives of childhood: child welfare records as historical sources.
History of Education, 45(4), 430–445
[1] Access to official documents in state administrative archives is
regulated by Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (SFS 2009:400), and
access to private archives stored in a public archive is , are regulated by
agreements between the donor and the public archive.
[3] It should be noted that since our two cases
were evaluated, a new state authority – the so called Swedish Ethical Review
Authority has replaced the regional Ethical Vetting Boards from January 1st
2019.
Danish mothers often hid the identity of a biological father from their child, if the father in question was a German soldier during the WWII Occupation. Even as adults many of these children born of war (chibows) did not know about their fathers’ identities. Sometimes children would develop suspicions, based on gossip and rumors circulating around them. Mothers, though, in most cases chose to bury this secret.[1] In this situation mothers and children face an ethical dilemma. A mother’s right to privacy about these deeply personal (and, back then, often shameful) experiences comes up against the child’s right to information about their biological father. This ethical dilemma is also not easily resolved by the mere fact of revelation.
Lotte Tarp, a Danish actress
and child born of war, describes in her memoir – det sku’ nødig hedde sig (1999) how secrecy around her German
father’s identity burdened her relationship with her mother Åse. Once she
finally confronted her mother as an adult woman and learned the truth, however,
the burden did not disappear. On the contrary, when Lotte started to search for
her biological family on her own, Åse became uneasy and did not actively
support the search. By uncovering her family secret, Lotte was intruding into and taking part in her mother’s private history, making it her own.[2]
How we understand secrecy and privacy
here matters. They are not identical concepts, but closely tied to each other. In
most general terms, both concepts limit access to information for others. Secrecy
can be seen as an intentional act of withholding or concealing information and
privacy as a personal right that does not require any specific action on behalf
of the subject itself. Privacy, though, also entails a normative claim over the
behavior of others. We are not supposed to actively seek out private
information about somebody else.[3] While this claim may be easily
justified between a general public sphere and an individual, within a family rights
to privacy are much less straight-forward.
Historian Deborah Cohen has
shown that secrecy and privacy were two sides of the same coin in 19th
century (middle-class) British family life. One could not exist without the
other, as secrecy facilitated privacy for family affairs and respect for
private spheres made secrecy easier. Cohen further argues that in many cases the
acceptance of stigmata within families lead to a wider, societal
de-stigmatization of the given secret and to the rise of the right to personal
privacy in the public sphere—giving way to what Cohen calls our current
confessional tell-it-all culture that demands an end to family secrecy. Privacy
remains highly valued today, even though the age of social media and smart
homes is currently changing our relation to personal privacy yet again. Overall,
though, secrecy still tends to be seen as a problem and privacy as a good.
This binary view neither captures the ambiguous relation between the two concepts, nor does it apply to all kinds of family secrets in the same way. The stakes of privacy within reproductive secrecy, that is, hidden information about biological relations and family members, are particularly high. Kinship can take many forms, but Carol Smart notes that in Euro-American contexts biological connections continue to be constitutive of relationships. Uncovering reproductive family secrets can change perceptions of one’s identity as well as of one’s legal status. The challenges of chibow family secrecy thus resonate here with ethical questions arising from Assisted Reproductive Technology or Adoption cases as well.
In the Danish context the
German Occupation was a distinct historical event and the silences around the
identities of German fathers often continued well into the 1990s. Many mothers
only shared their secret with their children late in life or not at all. Even
though the former stigma around having a German soldier as a father diminished with
time, mothers rarely followed the trend toward confessional culture. And such persistent
silences within families could pose significant challenges to those chibows
who, growing up and as adults, felt the need to find their biological fathers. Not
knowing one’s roots could be very difficult.
During and shortly after the Occupation
a mother’s
decision to hide the identity of a German father from a child served to ward
off social retributions. But for how long could this concealment be justified? Bjarne
Schmidt, another Danish chibow in search of information about his biological
father as an adult man, approached a Danish court in Aalborg in the 1990s to
gain access to his paternity case file from the war period. The judge refused
the request, noting that such access would have harmed his mother as he might
use this information against her. Here,
the court set the privacy of the mother in absolute and normative terms. According
to the court, the child should not
look for the mother’s hidden histories. This decision solves the
above-mentioned ethical dilemma in a particular way. It affirms the mother’s right to personal privacy far past the vulnerable
situation after the war
and negates the adult child’s personal right to know their biological father at
the same time.
Cohen complicates the
simplistic good privacy/bad secrecy binary from a historical perspective, but I
believe we need a more specific understanding of how privacy and secrecy are
modulated through power dynamics within
families to theorize family secrecy for children born of war. The crux here seems to be
that the right to maternal privacy
applies to society at large, but that
there comes a point when it does not apply anymore to children within the micro-cosmos of the family. It is not possible, of
course, to say when this point arrives within the context of each family.
But maybe a different theoretical approach to the
dynamics between secrecy and privacy can help us understand these developments
better. In the following, I suggest turning to theories on state secrecy as one
way of offering an alternative perspective on the ethical dilemma between
mothers and chibows sketched out above.
While not identical, there are relevant parallels in
state and family secrecy that can inform each other on questions of authority and accountability in hiding
information. Just like family secrecy, state secrecy is often considered harmful or
repressive, and most democratic theory does not see any place for secrecy in
politics. In her recent defense of state
secrecy Dorota Mokrosinska disputes this general dismissal of secrecy. She argues that democratic states can benefit
from and have the right to restrict information—within certain limits: state
secrecy is not a default option, but a special right granted through a
democratic decision process. If citizens
know information is hidden, they are also able to hold governments accountable
for these actions, especially once the pressing need for secrecy has subsided. If governments conceal
actions in the name of privacy, though, they could conduct “deep secrecy” fully
hidden from public view and scrutiny. Practices of state secrecy offer at least
the possibility of accountability and thus a more legitimate way of hiding
information if situations require confidential state actions. In this view, states
thus rather have a right to secrecy than privacy.
Do Danish mothers then also
have a right to secrecy rather than privacy toward their children born of war? Secrecy
does not solve the underlying ethical dilemma between the conflicting needs of
a mother’s right to bury difficult experiences and a child’s right to knowing
its roots. However, perhaps secrecy can help manage a form of co-existence of
these needs in ways privacy cannot. The
crucial difference in the respective legitimacy of state privacy and state secrecy
lies in their relation to liberty rights: The liberty to hide information must
coexist with the liberty to seek out this knowledge to be democratically and
ethically acceptable for states.
I would like to extend this argument to family secrecy. Also within families a mother’s normative claim to privacy can be problematic, if it expects chibows to refrain from searching for their biological fathers. Secrecy still impacts the child, but it does not foreclose a search as such. Adult children born of war can seek out information independent from their mother’s willingness to share details—allowing for a modicum of co-existence between conflicting needs.
Works Cited
Cohen, Deborah. Family Secrets – The Things We Tried to Hide.
Penguin Books Ltd, 2014.
Mokrosinska, Dorota. “Why
states have no right to privacy, but may be entitled to secrecy: A
non-consequentialist defense of state secrecy.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
11, no. 1 (2018): 1-30.
Tarp, Lotte. – det sku’ nødig hedde sig. Falun: Bogklubben 12 Bøger,
1999.
Schmidt, Bjarne. “Bjarne Schmidt, fodt den 8. april
1944.” In Horeunger og helligdage – tyskerbørns
beretninger. Edited by Arne Øland, 141-58.
Schønberg: Schønbergske Forl, 2001.
Warren, Carol and Barbara
Laslett. “Privacy and Secrecy: A Conceptual Comparison.” In Secrecy: A cross-cultural perspective.
Edited by Stanton K. Tefft, 25-34. NY: Human sciences press, 1980.
[1] Arne Øland. Horeunger og Helligdage – Tyskerbørns Beretninger,
p. 18-19.
[2] Lotte Tarp. – det sku’ nødig hedde sig, p. 155.
[3]Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett. “Privacy and Secrecy: A
Conceptual Comparison.” p. 27.
[4]Deborah Cohen. Family Secrets
– The Things We Tried to Hide, p. xii-xvi.
[5] Carol Smart. “Families, Secrets and Memories,”p.543.
[6] Arne Øland. Horeunger og Helligdage – Tyskerbørns
Beretninger
[7] Bjarne Schmidt. “Bjarne Schmidt, fodt den 8. april 1944.” p.
148-9.
[8] Dorota Mokrosinska. “Why states have no right to privacy, but may be entitled to secrecy: A non-consequentialist defense of state secrecy,” p. 24-6.
[9] Ibid, p. 6-11.
[10]
Ibid, p. 13.
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