Abstract
Background
Several researches indicate that most child victims delay disclosing of sexual abuse for significant periods of time. There are numerous reasons as to why children are avoiding ...the disclosure of the abuse. The aim of this study was to determine how a mother’s response to a child’s allegations impacts the child’s willingness to disclose sexual abuse.
Methods
We conducted a retrospective quantitative and qualitative analysis of 73 court-referred cases of child sexual abuse which have been disclosed in Slovenia in the last ten years. All the child victims included in the study were female and the perpetrators adult male persons. The expert opinions were made by the same expert.
Results
We realized that, at the occurrence of abuse, the child victims were from 4 to 15 years old and their mean age was at 11. 5 years. About two-thirds of children were victims of the intra-familial type (61.6%) and a little more than one third of extra-familial type of sexual abuse (38.4%). The group of victims with the support of their mothers needed about 9 months to disclose the secret, while the delay of the disclosure in the cases without the support of mothers was much longer (M=6.9 years).
Conclusion
For female child victims of sexual abuse the perceived protective attitude of their mothers is very important. Especially when the sexual abuse happened in the family, the mother’s support can attribute to stop the ongoing abuse, eliminate its immediate effects and decrease its likely negative long-term outcome.
The paper is a report on the findings of a research camp held in a village on the southern coast of Sri Lanka eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami. The camp was part of a wider project of ...collaboration between the University of Colombo and the University of Ljubljana, and its participants were students from both universities working together as a group. The report is mainly focused on the views and experiences of humanitarian aid as expressed by people from the village. They keenly observed the distribution of aid and saw irregularities and abuses that only increased their distress. Among other issues, they questioned the methodology that caused less visible and socially excluded members of the community to be excluded once again from the distribution of aid, and they particularly resented being forced into submission.
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