Cartography of silences (Autobiographies and sexual abuse in Spain)
When a writer decides to tell their life story, they draw the moral territory of an era. If we read one, we will get to know a person; if we read three hundred and thirty-eight, we might end up getting to know a country. This is exactly what three researchers from the University of the Balearic Islands have done in a study published by the Nature group. And the map that has emerged is as unexpected as it is unsettling.
There are scientific studies that provide data. And there are those that force us to rethink an era. The work recently published, in July 2026, in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, by the Nature group, is titled ‘Child Sexual Abuse in 20th Century Spanish Autobiographical Literature: Abuse Committed at School’, by researchers Jaume Sureda Negre, Júlia Vilasís-Pamos, and Aina Calvo Sastre, and clearly belongs to this second category. Not only because it addresses one of the most painful and silenced realities of contemporary history, but because it does so from a source as unexpected as it is valuable: autobiographies.
For decades, historians have reconstructed the past from archives, administrative documents, court records, correspondence, or the press. This study, on the other hand, starts from a different question: what happens if we read hundreds of autobiographies not just as literary works, but also as historical documents? What do they tell us about the society in which their authors grew up? The answer is striking. The researchers analyze 338 autobiographies written by people who attended school in Spain during the 20th century. In 47 of these works – almost 14% of the total – there are accounts or references to sexual abuse suffered during childhood. Even more revealing is that nearly two-thirds of these episodes took place in educational institutions: schools, boarding schools, seminaries, and religious colleges. The result does not aim to calculate the actual incidence of abuse, but rather to show the extent to which these memories are part of the consciousness of many writers and intellectuals.
Conventional maps outline coasts, mountain ranges, or borders. This one, on the other hand, points to another type of landscape: that of memories that remained hidden for decades. Jaume Sureda Negre, Júlia Vilasís-Pamos, and Aina Calvo Sastre have explored a territory rarely frequented by historians: autobiographical literature. They were not looking for a choral novel about 20th-century Spain, but for the imprints that school had left on the memory of those who lived it. And the result is surprising. The data is impressive, although it should be read with caution. The authors of the study themselves warn that this is not a statistical estimation of abuses in Spain. No one can deduce the real prevalence of the phenomenon from this corpus. The value of the research is different: to demonstrate that autobiographies constitute a first-rate historical source for understanding experiences that hardly appear in official documentation. This is, probably, the great methodological novelty of the work. For a long time, the history of education has been built from laws, regulations, administrative reports, inspections, and school archives. All of this is essential, but incomplete. Documents explain how an institution worked; autobiographies explain how it was lived. Between a ministerial provision and a child's memory, there is a whole world that official papers cannot reflect.
That is why this study has special strength. When memories accumulate, recollections cease to be individual exceptions and begin to draw patterns. What a reader might interpret as an isolated experience takes on a different meaning when it appears repeatedly in dozens of books written by people who did not know each other, who belonged to different generations, and who studied in very distant places. It is then that proper nouns acquire their full dimension. Jaume Santandreu, Alejandro Palomas, Terenci Moix, Miguel Gila, Carlos Boyero, Román Gubern, Javier Reverte, Antonio Gamoneda, Fernando Sánchez-Dragó, Francisco Rabal, Juan Goytisolo, Joan Francesc Mira, Manuel Vicent, Ramon Folch, J.L. Giménez Frontín, Joan Margarit... Jaume Santandreu recalls his childhood at La Salle de Manacor and explains how that episode remained hidden for many years. Alejandro Palomas turns ‘Esto no se dice’ into a stark reflection on trauma, silence, and the difficulty of reclaiming one's voice. Terenci Moix evokes a school environment marked by authoritarianism and repression. In other autobiographies, the references are briefer, tangential, but all contribute to drawing the same horizon: that of a society where silence seemed to be part of the natural order of things. Not all books have the same tone. Some are an open denunciation; others let the memory fall with a sobriety that is even more impressive. Sometimes, two lines are enough for the reader to understand that behind that silence there was an open wound. Memory follows no protocol.
And here appears an element that I found particularly revealing. The study does not only speak of people, of Franciscans, of Augustinians, of Escolapios, of Jesuits, of Marists, of Brothers of La Salle... it also speaks of spaces. Without intending to, the autobiographies end up building a moral geography of the school. Classrooms, dormitories, courtyards, stairs, chapels, confessionals, offices, and corridors appear there. Everyday places that, depending on who remembers them, evoke learning, friendship, and discoveries or, on the contrary, fear, humiliation, and silence. As a geographer, this aspect seems particularly suggestive to me. I have always thought that territories are not simple surfaces. Places accumulate experiences. A landscape is also the memory of the people who have inhabited it. Schools, like squares or village streets, are spaces loaded with meanings. There is no map that indicates where a childhood was lost or where a teacher awakened a vocation. But these places exist within the memory of those who lived them.
Perhaps, after all, this is the deepest lesson of the work. It does not only speak of abuses. It speaks of time. Of the time necessary for a society to find the words to explain what was previously unpronounceable. Most of these accounts do not appear until forty or fifty years after the events. Not because the pain had disappeared, but because only then did the social context allow the transformation of silence into narrative. Literature, thus, ceases to be solely an aesthetic exercise. It becomes a form of knowledge. Historians usually seek truth in archives; memorialists seek it within their own consciousness. When both perspectives coincide, the past becomes richer, more complex, and also more human.
I find it interesting that research of this nature has emerged from the University of the Balearic Islands and that publishing it in a Nature group journal is not just a recognition of its authors; it is also a demonstration that further research, carried out by the UIB, brings new questions to international debates. There is a detail in the article that I believe can give it an extraordinary dimension: the authors have deposited the autobiographical fragments they have used in an open repository. This means that we can go directly to the original texts, see how Terenci Moix writes, what Jaume Santandreu says exactly, how Alejandro Palomas constructs memory, or which episodes Miguel Gila, Carlos Boyero, and Román Gubern explain, among others, always within the scope of the study. Each author finds their own language to approach the past: (“I have survived the horror that has kept me mute since they killed my voice, that I have lived with fear”, Palomas; “The cells of some priests would be scenarios of complete sodomitic practices”, García-Posada.)
When we pass by a school, we usually see a facade, a courtyard, open windows, and the noise of children. But no map points out the memories that inhabit them. Some will remember the teacher who taught them to read. Others, the first friend. Someone, the first time they felt that the world was bigger than their village. And a few, too few, but too many, will remember a silence that lasted half a lifetime. And that is why, sometimes, literature ends up being the best cartography of memory. When hundreds of memories coincide, they cease to be just memories. They become history. And it is then that we discover that there is also a cartography of silence. Of the silence of the abused. Of the complicit silence of the Church.
