NCJ Number
205664
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 25 Issue: 5 Dated: May 2001 Pages: 683-702
Date Published
May 2001
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This article reports on three Swedish studies that were designed to determine whether a person's exposure to a picture of actual child sexual abuse provokes anxiety in the viewer as well as whether a viewer will transfer responses to the picture of child sexual abuse to a neutral picture of an adult's interaction with a child.
Abstract
In all of the three studies, adult men and women were exposed to a drawing intended to portray child sexual abuse, and they were asked to interpret the picture. In the first study, 226 participants were tested for anxiety both before and after being exposed to the drawing of child sexual abuse. In the second study, 200 new participants were asked to interpret an innocent picture of child-adult interaction after they had been exposed to the picture of actual child sexual abuse. In the third study, 89 new participants were first exposed to the neutral picture followed by exposure to the picture of actual child sexual abuse. Nearly three-fourths of the participants in the three studies interpreted the picture of the sexualized interaction between the adult and the child as being a situation of sexual threat to the child. In the first study, even those who interpreted the sexual abuse as only a problematic child-adult situation without sexual implications reported a significant increase in their anxiety, as did those who saw a clear sexual threat to the child. None of the participants in studies two or three interpreted the neutral picture to be an incident of child sexual abuse. The sex of the abused child was significantly more often interpreted by viewers as opposite to one's own gender. Both men and women preferred to see the child's sex as opposite to their own sex in the threatening situation. There was no such difference in the interpretation of the neutral picture. The findings suggest that some people are psychologically resistant to interpreting adult-child sexual interactions as being what they are; rather they interpret the interaction to be lacking in sexual connotations in order to avoid the anxiety associated with the act of child sexual abuse. These findings have implications for how the adults in a child victim's world respond to their sexual victimization as well as how those charged with investigating allegations of child sexual abuse interpret evidence. 6 tables and 30 references