Forgiveness intervention for female South Korean adolescent aggressive victims

a r t i c l e i n f o We investigated an intervention designed to help female aggressive victims improve their levels of psychological and school adjustment. Adolescent aggressive victims are youth who demonstrate heightened levels of aggressive behavior and are frequently victimized by others. A program focused on the psychology of forgiveness was implemented and tested against both an alternative skillstreaming program and a no-treatment control group. Forty-eight female adolescent aggressive victims in South Korea (age 12 to 21 years) were recruited from a middle school and a juvenile correctional facility. Participants were randomly assigned to groups. Both forgiveness and skillstreaming interventions were implemented in a small-group format for 12 weeks. Participants in the forgiveness group reported significant decreases in anger, hostile attribution, aggression, and delinquency at post-test and follow-up; they also reported significant increases in empathy at post-test and follow-up and grades at post-test. We discuss implications for the psychological development of adolescent aggressive victims. Recently, psychologists have shown a heightened degree of interest in aggressive victims, an understudied subgroup of youth initially identified by Olweus (1978). Aggressive victims are adolescents who act aggressively toward others and who are victims of others' aggression (Olweus, 1978). Aggressive victims are thought to be at greater risk for psychological, behavioral, and academic problems than those who are aggressors only or victims only Practitioners and educators need interventions that can specifically help female aggressive victims. This group of adolescents experiences more internalizing problems such as peer rejection, depression, anxiety, and loneliness than their male peers (Crick & Zahn-Waxler, 2003; Putallaz & Bierman, 2004). Yet there are no known intervention studies that focus on female adolescent aggressive victims exclusively. Forgiveness education is a promising intervention approach that can reduce anger (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000) and may help aggressive victims overcome their pervasive difficulties. In this study we compared a forgiveness intervention to a skillstreaming program among South Korean female adolescent aggressive victims. The interventions were implemented and tested in a middle school and in a juvenile correctional facility to explore the seriousness of issues that forgiveness programs can address. Aggressive victims Researchers exploring the relationship between social-cognition and aggression use different methods of classifying adolescents as aggressive victims. Therefore the incidence of aggressive victim status reported in the literature varies considerably. For example, only 2% of Rigby's (1994) sample met criteria for aggressive victim status while 15% of Austin and Joseph's …