PSYU3339 - Child Sexual Abuse

child sexual abuse

the exploitation of children through rape, incest, and molestation by parents or other adults

CSA disclosure

< half of victims disclose at the time of the abuse
- 60-70% delay disclosure into adulthood

Barriers of children's disclosure

- limited support
- perceived negative consequences
- feelings of self-blame, shame, guilt
- child doesn't consider experience to be serious enough to report
- gender (boys less willing than girls)
- relationship to perpetrator

boys as victims

- face significant levels of disbelief and discrimination
- practitioners unprepared to handle sexual abuse cases of this gender
- underscores social invisibility of sexual violence against this gender

CSA prevalence

- decline in CSA figures
- rate of reporting of boys has increased
- sex ratio of girls to boys = 1.14:1

CSA effects on children

- problems concerning emotions
- regression of continence skills (e.g. toilet training)
- cognitive function affected
- more aggressive
- socially withdrawn
- less socially competent

- no clear symptom pattern, doesn't relate to all victims

CSA effects on adults

- depression
- anxiety
- PTSD (higher when penetration was involved)
- dissociation
- cognitive distortions (self-blame, low self-esteem, disbelief in self-efficacy)
- interpersonal outcomes
- males = externalise distress
- females = internalise distress

abuse dichotomy

either they are bad or I am bad

> leads to conclusion that it must be the child's fault that they were hurt therefore they are as bad as what was done to them

mediators of CSA

- abuse severity and parental support = negatively associated, both related to coping strategies
- coping strategies predictive long-term psychological adjustment

CSA and self-regulation

- CSA associated with poor self-regulatory skills and emotional regulation
- hinders development of self-efficacy
- low self-efficacy = self-blame and self-denigration
- social support + high self-efficacy = buffer effects of trauma

CSA victims as witnesses

- often the only witness
- crucial for the child to testify to enable prosecution
- concern over reliability and truthfulness of children's evidence

psychological evidence relevant to testimonial competence

- memorial skills
- language and communication skills
- lying and truth telling skills

Children's lying and truth telling knowledge

- understanding unrelated to accuracy and honesty of their reports
- 3-6 years: children who lied about an adult's transgression were better able to identify a lie
- knowledge doesn't guarantee truth telling
- lying and truth telling influenced by anticipated outcome

Outcome expectations for truth telling

- the more children anticipate punishment = less likely they are to tell the truth and less positively truth-telling is evaluated
- reassurances about outcomes of telling the truth = increase truth telling and evaluation

false denial

when an event has occurred and it is falsely denied

lying about CSA

- reactive
- false denial or omission
- scared of punishment

What did a laboratory analog study show about truth-telling involving adult transgression?

- adult stole stickers and asked child not to tell
- no false allegations were made by control group who witnessed nothing
- majority of child witnesses either falsely denied or omitted to the truth
- reluctance to tell the truth but no fabrication of events

gist memory

memory for essential meaning
- a symbolic mental representation of stimulus that captures meaning
- young children haven't developed this yet so can be more accurate than older children and adults in providing verbatim accounts of events

Issue with suggestive questioning

- increases amount of information reported by child
- may be less accurate
- young children more vulnerable to this so reliability is questionable

Sociocognitive Interview Protocol (SCI)

- child-focused not adult-focused
- aims to facilitate recollection using retrieval aids and supportive questioning styles
- communicative competence enabled by interviewer scaffolding the child's narrative

temporal prompts

"you said you play with a truck - what did you play with before the truck? what did you do afterwards?"

directive prompts

- directed by what child has already said
- take them back to previous statement to get more information
- occurs when child stops talking after running through their whole agenda
- "a little while ago you told me about a truck - can you tell me what colour it was?"

false allegations

- allegation is fabricated rather than denied
- can be spontaneously generated or coached by others

coaching

similar to creating false memories through the use of repeated misinformation

Factors that contribute to unreliable evidence

- poor interviewing practices
- coaching by malicious adult
- trusted perpetrator swears child to secrecy
- anticipated negative outcome for truth-telling

cross-examination

- where coaching occurred and children initially provided false testimony = more effective in eliciting truth

- where coaching did not occur = increased child's propensity to recant initial true allegation and reduced their accurate reporting of neutral events