Parents as protectors: A qualitative study of parents’ views on child sexual abuse prevention

Although parents are essential to child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention efforts, their views on prevention and protection are not always represented in the research literature. In this qualitative study of 24 Australian parents, beliefs about CSA, its risk factors, prevention methods, and parents’ role in CSA protection, and parents' approaches to protection of their own children, are examined. Findings were condensed into five themes: (a) parents' understanding of child sexual abuse, grooming and risk; (b) parent-led CSA education; (c) parents’ beliefs about CSA education; (d) children recognizing and resisting CSA; and (e) parent responsibility for protection. Findings suggest that parents have a good knowledge of CSA and its risks. However, they do not provide their children with the comprehensive prevention messages recommended by prevention campaigns and many concentrate on abduction dangers. This gap between knowledge and parental communication with children could be due to parents' beliefs that there may be harms associated with education of children about CSA (e.g., such as inciting new fears and worries or reducing trust in others) and that the method may not be effective in protecting children from CSA. This study adds to the existing literature by presenting information that could be useful in designing programs to include parents in CSA protection and by approaching CSA research with parents as the key agents in the protection of children.     

The role of expressed emotions in online discussions

Abstract

We investigated relationships among expressed emotions, perceived motivation, perceived emotions, and three dependent variables (i.e., behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement, and student achievement) in the context of a blended online course. We defined “expressed emotions” as emotions detected by an affective computing tool in messages that students posted to online discussion forums in a blended undergraduate writing course. The results of two-step hierarchical multivariate regressions revealed that expressed emotions differentiated positive emotions from negative emotions better than perceived emotions did. Moreover, while no significant effect emerged for perceived motivation and perceived emotions, expressed fear was a significant predictor of student achievement (i.e., final score). Although affective computing is in its infancy, our findings suggest the potential use of expressed emotions for educational research and practice.     

The parental bonding experiences of sex offenders: a comparison between child molesters and rapists

OBJECTIVE: It has often been hypothesized that because of a lack of early satisfactory attachments, sex offenders grow up unable to form relationships with adults, which makes them susceptible to pursue intimacy in maladaptive ways. This research aims to empirically examine the parental bonding patterns for a group of sex offenders, comparing child molesters and rapists. METHOD: Seventy-six men convicted of a sexual offense (57 child molesters and 19 rapists) completed the parental bonding instrument (PBI), and were assessed by means of a semi-structured clinical interview. RESULTS: Affectionless control style of parental bonding was highly prevalent amongst the sex offenders. There was some suggestion that low parental care was associated with childhood abuse and disturbances, particularly for child molesters. High overprotection in mothers was linked with parental separation and sex play with male peers in childhood. CONCLUSIONS: There is a need to replicate the study with non-sexual offenders as a comparison group, and to establish whether the PBI provides a useful adjunct to studies of adult romantic attachment in sex offenders.     

Risk factors for the perpetration of child sexual abuse: a review and meta-analysis

OBJECTIVES: Since the late 1980s, there has been a strong theoretical focus on psychological and social influences of perpetration of child sexual abuse. This paper presents the results of a review and meta-analysis of studies examining risk factors for perpetration of child sexual abuse published since 1990. METHOD: Eighty-nine studies published between 1990 and April of 2003 were reviewed. Risk factors were classified into one of the following six broad categories: family factors, externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, social deficits, sexual problems, and attitudes/beliefs. Sex offenders against children (SOC) were compared to three comparison groups identified within the 89 studies: sex offenders who perpetrated against adults (SOA), non-sex offenders, and non-offenders with no history of criminal or sexual behavior problems. RESULTS: Results for the six major categories showed that SOC were not different from SOA (all d between -.02 and .14) other than showing lower externalizing behaviors (d=-.25). Sex offenders against children were somewhat different from non-sex offenders, especially with regard to sexual problems and attitudes (d=.83 and .51). Sex offenders against children showed substantial differences from non-offenders with medium sized effects in all six major categories (d's range from .39 to .58). CONCLUSION: Child sex offenders are different from non-sex offenders and non-offenders but not from sex offenders against adults. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: This study suggests that the presence of general risk factors may lead to a variety of negative behavioral outcomes, including the perpetration of child sexual offending. Family factors were strongly related to the perpetration of child sex offending (vs. non-sexual offending or non-offending) and may be valuable intervention points for interrupting the development of child sex offending, as well as other negative behaviors. Other potential points for intervention may focus on the development of appropriate social and emotional skills that contribute to sexual offending.     

Cognitive distortions and blame attribution in sex offenders against adults and children

OBJECTIVE: Sexual offenders tend to hold attitudes and beliefs which minimize and justify their offending behavior. It was hypothesized that distorted thinking supporting sexual offending and blame attribution would differ depending on the offence characteristics of different groups of sexual offenders. METHOD: Two groups of sexual offenders separated on the basis of the age of their victims (sex offenders against children, 36; sex offenders against adults, 30) were compared on measures of cognitive distortions relating to sex with children and rape and a measure of blame attribution which assesses external, mental element, and guilt feeling attributions. RESULTS: Child sexual offenders endorsed more cognitive distortions relating to sex with children, but there were no group differences in cognitive distortions relating to rape. Those who offended against adults reported more external attributions and child offenders reported more guilt feeling attributions. Mental element attribution related to alcohol intoxication and use of violence in the offence, but was not related to group differences. CONCLUSIONS: Results are interpreted as suggesting that child sex offenders support their offending by more enduring distorted cognitions, while those who offend against adults use blame attributions associated with the particular offence.     

大学生人际信任与社会支持的相关研究

采用人际信任量表和社会支持评定量表对安徽师范大学160名大学本科学生进行测查,用以探讨大学生人际信任与社会支持的关系。结果表明:性别与出生地对于人际信任的影响并不显著;是否为独生子和年级对于人际信任的影响显著;大学生的人际信任与社会支密切相关;回归分析表明,社会支持和主观支持均能预测大学生人际信任,表明社会支持是影响人际信任的重要因素。     

How Does Racial Context Matter?: Family Preparation-for-Bias Messages and Racial Coping Reported by Black Youth

Black families and youth likely consider specific racial discriminatory situations in preparation-for-bias messages and racial coping responses. Our study investigated coping responses embedded in youth-reported Black families’ preparation-for-bias messages and youths’ proactive coping responses to specific racially discriminatory situations—teachers’ negative expectations, store employees’ hyper-monitoring and police harassment. Gender and racial discrimination experience differences were considered along with relations between messages and coping. Our investigation was guided by the integrated-developmental, transactional/ecological, intersectionality, and Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory theoretical frameworks. We conducted cluster analyses using data from 117 Black youth aged 13–14 to identify situation-specific family messages and youth coping responses. Families’ messages and youths’ responses varied in content and frequency based on the specific discriminatory situation, which suggests consideration of context.     

Differences and similarities between violent offenders and sex offenders

OBJECTIVES: To investigate differences and similarities between violent offenders and two types of sex offenders, rapists and child molesters, in terms of their personality, the nature of the victim, the role of alcohol, and their confession to their crime. METHOD: Thirty-six adult sex offenders, 23 child molesters, and 32 violent offenders were compared on personality measures, their relationship with the victim, the presence of alcohol intoxication, their confession rate and retraction at trial, and the reasons they gave for having confessed to the police. RESULTS: Child molesters and adult sex offenders (rapists) were significantly more introverted than the violent offenders. The child molesters had higher social desirability scores than the other groups, they tended to assault relatives and friends, they were rarely intoxicated while committing the offense, and they had strong internal need to confess to the police. Rapists and violent offenders were more commonly intoxicated during the commission of the offense; the former tended to assault acquaintances, where violent offenders most commonly assaulted strangers. Exactly half of the rapists retracted their confession when the case went to trial; in contrast none of the other offenders retracted their confession. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that there are significant differences as well as similarities between the three groups of offenders, which have implications for assessment and treatment.     

Similarities in modi operandi of institutional and non-institutional child sexual offending: Systematic case comparisons

Little is known about the extent to whichinstitutional child sex offending differs from non-institutional offending. Strategies to secure the compliance of child victims were systematically compared to compare the modi operandi (prior to, during and following abuse), and the type of power (intimate, aggressive, coercive) applied by child sexual offenders in institutional versus non-institutional settings. A sample of 59 of the most recent child sexual abuse cases referred for prosecution in three Australian states was manually reviewed and coded. Of these, six were cases of institutional abuse, one of which involved crossover offending. Based on complainant age and gender and patterns in offending behaviors, institutional cases were matched with cases of non-institutional abuse. Complainants of both genders ranged in age from 5 to 16 years at abuse onset. Offenders were male family members or friends, priests, an employer and one female school teacher. Results demonstrated commonalities in the modi operandi and grooming methods applied in institutional and non-institutional contexts. Implications for abuse prevention are summarized.     

A systematic review of fantasy driven vs. contact driven internet-initiated sexual offences: Discrete or overlapping typologies?

Within the literature individuals who use the internet to facilitate the sexual abuse of a minor are generally classified as being fantasy or contact driven. Classification is based upon the intended location for sexual climax: fantasy driven individuals aim to reach sexual climax online, whereas contact driven individuals target minors to achieve physical sex offline. This review systematically investigates whether there is an empirical basis for the distinction between these two proposed discrete types. Comparison of tactics and behaviour are considered to examine whether the contact vs. fantasy distinction is useful. A two-stage literature selection process, considered against pre-determined inclusion criteria, identified a total of twenty-two studies. As methodological heterogeneity limited the ability to conduct pooled analysis, a narrative synthesis of data employing an interpretive approach was conducted. This showed that the contact and fantasy distinction is ambiguous, given that both groups engage in online behaviours that provide them with online sexual gratification that can also lead to offline contact. Furthermore, no clear pattern of behaviour was found to define contact and fantasy individuals idiosyncratically. The European Online Grooming Project typology is thus proposed as a better representation of this behaviour; intimacy seeking, adaptable and hypersexualized groups. The distinction between these groups focuses primarily on the intensity of the relationship, acknowledging that sexual abuse can occur with or without offline contact. This review also highlights the need for larger, methodologically robust studies that examine the behaviour of online child sexual offenders.     

Facebook-Induced Motivation Shifts in a French Online Course

This study explores the effects of instructor’s self-disclosure using the Facebook social networking online platform on students’ motivation types in an online language course. The participants were 104 beginning French students enrolled in an online French course at a major research university in the southeast U.S. The participants were divided into a Facebook group, where they could access the instructor’s Facebook profile throughout the semester, and a control group. The Academic Motivation Scale (Noels, Pelletier, Clement, & Vallerand, 2003) was used for determining whether the participants were intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, anchoring this research within the Self-Determination Theory model (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Post-treatment results indicated that participants assigned to the Facebook group experienced a significant shift in motivation type that research has determined as being beneficial for language learning (Gardner, 1985). No such shift occurred in students assigned to the control group. This shift is of particular importance in an online course environment where the instructor’s Facebook profile was the only means of teacher’s self-disclosure unlike a face-to-face environment where teacher self-disclosure can occur spontaneously.     

Parent–Child Shared Time From Middle Childhood to Late Adolescence: Developmental Course and Adjustment Correlates

The development and adjustment correlates of parent–child social (parent, child, and others present) and dyadic time (only parent and child present) from age 8 to 18 were examined. Mothers, fathers, and firstborns and secondborns from 188 White families participated in both home and nightly phone interviews. Social time declined across adolescence, but dyadic time with mothers and fathers peaked in early and middle adolescence, respectively. In addition, secondborns’ social time declined more slowly than firstborns’, and gendered time use patterns were more pronounced in boys and in opposite‐sex sibling dyads. Finally, youths who spent more dyadic time with their fathers, on average, had higher general self‐worth, and changes in social time with fathers were positively linked to changes in social competence.     

Cycle of abuse and psychopathology in cleric and noncleric molesters of children and adolescents

Sexual abuse in childhood is frequently reported among sex offenders and has been hypothesized to be one of a number of psychological factors etiologically related to perpetration of child molestation in adulthood. In the current study we examine a sample of cleric and noncleric admitted child molesters and normal control subjects in their exposure to sexual abuse in childhood and current psychopathology. Odds ratios for the association between exposure to sexual abuse and child molestation were obtained while adjusting for group differences in demographic and psychological characteristics. Results indicated exposure to sexual abuse in childhood was associated with becoming a child molester for both cleric and noncleric offenders (p < .0002). Nonclerics indicated more severe psychopathology than clerics. Sexual abuse in childhood is one of many risk factors for becoming a perpetrator of child molestation in adulthood for both cleric and noncleric child molesters. Noncleric offenders demonstrated more sociopathy and mental disorder in general while cleric offenders indicated more sexual conflictedness, suggesting different psychoetiologies of offending among cleric and noncleric child molesters.     

‘Pervy role-play and such’: girls' experiences of sexual messaging online

Sexting is one of the recurring causes of concern in public discussion of young people and network media. This paper builds on findings from a survey with 1269 Finnish female respondents aged 11–18 conducted using a popular online community for girls on their experiences of and views on online messages concerning sex and sexuality. Sixty-five per cent of respondents had received messages related to sex from either adults or minors while 20% had also sent such messages themselves. The paper asks how girls experience and make sense of sexual messaging and what motivates them to engage in such interactions. Specific attention is paid to the distinction between unwanted and wanted messages. While messages from unknown people identified as adult were often discussed as unpleasant or ‘creepy’, sexual messaging, role-play, cybersex experiments and discussions related to sex among peers were defined as fun and pleasurable. Girls display notable resilience and describe coping strategies connected to unwanted messaging but equally frame sexual messaging and role-play as issues of choice motivated by curiosity and pleasure. The paper addresses sexual messaging as a form of sexual play and learning, and argues for the importance of contextual analysis in understanding its forms and potentialities.     

From one girl to ‘three girls’: the importance of separating agency from blame (and harm from wrongfulness) in narratives of childhood sexual abuse and exploitation

In May 2012, nine men from Rochdale were convicted and jailed for grooming girls with alcohol, drugs and gifts before forcing them to have sex with multiple men. Following the case in Rochdale similar cases of grooming and sexual abuse/exploitation of young girls came to light in various towns and cities across the UK. In 2017, the BBC aired the drama Three Girls which featured the story of three of the victims whose abusers were ultimately jailed in May 2012, including one whose story of abuse was not listened to and whose abusers were ultimately not charged with abusing her (although they were charged with abusing other young girls). In this paper, I draw parallels between the experiences of these three girls and another victim of childhood sexual abuse (interviewed as part of an ESRC funded research project) to show how the central features of this story (childhood sexual innocence and victims’ lack of agency) are deeply problematic not only for victims and child protection services, but also for how teachers and other education professionals understand children and young people’s sexuality and CSA (a term I use to include child sexual exploitation or CSE) and ultimately how they respond to victims.     

Affective-motivational effects of performance feedback in computer-based assessment: Does error message complexity matter?

The impact of computer-based performance feedback on students’ affective-motivational state may be very different, depending on the positive or negative direction of the feedback message and its specific content. This experiment investigated whether more elaborated error messages improve students’ affective-motivational response to negative (i.e., corrective) feedback. We systematically varied the presence and complexity of corrective feedback messages (1 × 4 between-subjects design) and analyzed the effects of the provided feedback on students’ emotions, task-related perceived usefulness, and expectancy-value beliefs. University students (N = 439) worked on a low-stakes test with 12 constructed-response geometry tasks. They received either no feedback or different complexities of immediate corrective feedback after incorrect responses (i.e., Knowledge of Results [KR], Knowledge of Correct Response [KCR], or Elaborated Feedback [EF]), paired with immediate confirmatory KCR feedback after correct responses (i.e., confirming their response). Our data showed that students’ task-level performance moderated the emotional impact of feedback (i.e., beneficial effects after correct responses; detrimental effects after incorrect responses). Students’ performance further moderated several feedback effects on students’ expectancy-value beliefs. Regarding error message complexity, we found that students reported higher levels of positive emotions after receiving EF or KCR compared to KR, while only EF decreased students' level of negative emotions compared to KR and increased students' task-related perceived usefulness compared to all other groups. Overall, our results suggest that performance feedback is likely to improve students’ affective-motivational state when the feedback confirms a correct response. Moreover, when reporting an error, EF (or KCR messages) were more beneficial to affective-motivational outcomes than simple KR notifications.     

Tweens' conceptions of privacy online: implications for educators

There is considerable debate about young people's concern for privacy today, given their frequent use of social media to share information and other content about themselves and others. While researchers have investigated the online privacy practices of teens and emerging adults, relatively little is known about the attitudes and behaviors of younger youth. Drawing on interviews with 42 middle school students, or ‘tweens’, we explore how youth in this age group think about and manage privacy issues online, as well as the messages they report hearing from educators about online privacy. Our findings suggest that most tweens value privacy, seek privacy from both strangers and known others online, and use a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online. Further, tweens' online privacy concerns are considerably broader than the ‘stranger danger’ messages they report hearing from teachers. We discuss the educational implications of these findings.     

当代大学生人际信任现状及影响因素分析

本研究采用"人际信任量表",考察了福建省部分高校大学生的人际信任现状。结果表明:(1)不同性别、独生/非独生、父母职业、家庭所在地、年级大学生在人际信任总分存在显著差异;(2)不同性别、年级、专业的大学生在普遍信任方面均存在显著差异;(3)不同家庭所在地、独生/非独生、性别、年级大学生在特殊信任方面存在显著差异;(4)大学生人际信任受内部因素(性别)、外部因素(家庭、学校)影响。     

Backstage accounting in preschool: analysing dealing with complaints as ‘rehearsing away’ professional knowledge

Citizens of modern societies must trust a broad range of systems and professionals. When distrust arises, professionals are expected to be accountable. This paper draws on conversational material from a preschool team meeting. When a preschool work team prepares to meet a parent who has complained about their recurring neglect to change her child’s nappies ‘in time’, they are found: (1) to carefully review the encounter with the client, (2) in a team-building fashion, to select suitable accounts to offer ‘front stage’ and (3) to internally justify their selection of accounts. Our results indicate that work team members who engaged in backstage rehearsal author the organisation for building trust and, simultaneously ‘rehearse away’ what should remain the organisations’ secrets. Communicating the intent to satisfy was deemed more important than was using evidence from their professional knowledge base.