The trouble with telling: Children's constructions of sexual abuse.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

While it is commonly acknowledged that child sexual abuse is a pervasive problem, children's interpretations of abuse are generally ignored in the social sciences. Despite the increase of academic literature on sexual abuse since the 1980s, knowledge bases have not kept pace. This dissertation fills significant gaps in the literature by appreciating children's understandings of sexual abuse, focusing on how social and cultural meanings of abuse affect disclosure processes. The purpose of this dissertation is to give children's experiences of sexual abuse voice in theoretical and empirical literatures. This objective provides empirical illustrations of how culturally- and ideologically-based meanings of gender, race, sexuality and so forth affect children's interpretations of and decisions to disclose abuse to others. The goal is to present children's verbal understandings of abuse as a social experience; in other words, how do children interpret and make social meaning of sexual abuse? How are their descriptions patterned by demography and case characteristics?.
To answer these questions, I analyze ten years of semi-structured videotaped forensic interviews of children (with accompanying case files) seen for reported or suspected cases of sexual abuse from 1995 to 2004. The videotaped interviews are from an urban Midwestern non-profit Children's Advocacy Center and were transcribed verbatim. Using critical discourse analysis from a sociological perspective, I examine how, and under what conditions, children are willing to disclose sexual abuse and how their disclosures are socially structured and elaborated by others. The results indicate that interpretation and disclosure is structured by the social practices and collectivities in which children participate as social beings. The meaning of sexual abuse is negotiated with others interactionally and changes overtime. This study shows that social and structural factors (e.g., definitions of abuse, stigmatization, blame, fear of consequences, and social reactions) act as barriers to children's disclosures and are predominately patterned by gender, age, and race/ethnicity. I address the significance of these findings for research and practice and how collectively shared resources (e.g., discursive, structural and symbolic) affect children's abuse interpretations and ultimately act to reproduce power relations and sustain social hierarchies.