Making excuses and making sense: The role and nuances of active listening in eliciting and managing accounts of sexual violations

Across institutional settings, people who talk about having committed sexual violence often do so in ways that may neutralize their personal culpability for it. These so-called neutralizations may be part of a pro-social forward-looking narrative, but might also obscure information and strengthen attitudes that enable further violence. In this article, we examine how one such neutralization –excuses – is managed turn-by-turn, in research interviews with 19 young persons who have committed sexual violations. We specifically ask how the interviewers respond to potential ‘excuses’ in interviewees’ talk, and how these responses in turn affect their subsequent conversation. The purpose is to unpack the details of how this is done, and what we might learn of relevance to social work practice. Using conversation analysis, we show how resources of active listening can support and steer interviewee reflections while neither endorsing nor confronting potential ‘excuses’. This way of responding creates room for co-achieving a project of making sense without displacing responsibility. We unpack how the interviewer uses subtle verbal and non-verbal resources to suspend explicitly evaluative responses, enabling gentle negotiations of the interviewees’ accounts and recognition of the interviewees’ sensemaking projects. Three key implications for practice are discussed. First, the importance of supporting the clients’ sense-making; second that subtle nuances in how active listening can both support and put interactional pressure on the client to continue and adapt their story, and third, the potential utility of opening with a non-evaluative, relationally oriented stance.