NCJ Number
170807
Journal
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse Volume: 6 Issue: 3 Dated: (1997) Pages: 15-29
Date Published
1997
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This study traces children who initially presented to a hospital emergency room with purely physical complaints later determined to be a sexually transmitted disease considered to be compelling evidence of sexual abuse.
Abstract
The study examined cases where there was no history, suspicion, or disclosure of abuse, and the child failed to disclose any sexual contact in the initial sexual abuse disclosure interview. These interview "false negatives" previously had been found to be related to caretaker biases against considering the possibility of abuse. However, it was not clear what role, if any, individual psychological processes may have played in the false negative interviews. This study re-located and assessed a small number of these children for dissociative and behavioral symptoms. The study used two non-contemporaneous comparison groups: "true positive" (i.e., disclosing) sexually abused children from the same hospital emergency room and non-abused, non-psychiatric controls from the same hospital. False negative children had significantly higher levels of dissociative symptoms, although they did not differ from true positives and non-abused controls on general behavioral problems. Results are consistent with an association between false negatives in sexual abuse interviews and dissociation. Because the study was correlational, and dissociation was measured long after the false negative interview, the article advises caution in inferring that dissociation may cause false negative interviews. Figure, references