Heterogeneity of Symptom Presentation in Sexually Abused Youth: Complex Profiles of a Complex Problem

نویسندگان

  • Genelle K. Sawyer
  • Poonam Tavkar
چکیده

Introduction In recent decades, considerable attention has been given to child sexual abuse and many studies have focused on the short-term and long-term consequences of the abuse. Results have continually indicated that sexually abused children and adolescents display a considerable breadth of symptoms, including anxiety, depression, poor self-esteem, substance abuse, selfharm behavior, post-traumatic stress symptoms, sexual behavior problems, cognitive distortions, attribution errors, and disturbed relatedness (e.g., Kendall-Tackett et al., 1993; Paolucci, Genuis, & Violato, 2001). From this literature, one theme has continually emerged: victimization does not necessarily have an inevitable pattern or a unified symptom presentation for the majority of youth. Rather, sexually abused youth display a multitude of patterns of symptoms at varying levels of severity. Another important finding within the area of child sexual abuse has been that some youth exhibit little to no symptomatology after the abuse (Hecht & Hansen, 1999; KendallTackett et al., 1993). Despite the consistent finding that sexually abused youth are a heterogeneous group who display a wide range of symptoms, few studies have examined the within-group variability or attempted to further understand the different patterns displayed by sexually abused youth. Instead, many studies have treated sexual abuse as a single phenomenon, assuming homogeneity of the sample. Friedrich (1998) stated that more studies need to employ multivariate statistical procedures (e.g., cluster analysis) to help better understand the range of symptoms displayed by these youth. To date, only a few studies have utilized cluster analysis to examine the withingroup variability of victims of sexual abuse (e.g., Bennett, Hughes, & Luke, 2000; Follette, Naugle, & Follette, 1997), and only one of these used a sample of sexually abused youth (Sedlar, 2001). While these findings provide useful groundwork, the limited examination of sexually abused children and the small sample sizes in the above studies restrict the generalizability of the findings. The purpose of the proposed study is to elucidate the clinical profiles of emotional and behavioral adjustment that are present within a sample of sexually abused children

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Ethnic differences in symptom presentation of sexually abused girls.

Although researchers have begun to examine the issue of ethnic and cultural factors in childhood sexual abuse (CSA), relatively little has been done to look at possible ethnic and cultural differences in psychological symptoms related to CSA. This study investigated the relationship between ethnicity and symptom presentation among Hispanic, African American, and Caucasian sexually abused girls....

متن کامل

Unseen Wounds: The Contribution of Psychological Maltreatment to Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Risk Outcomes

For this study, we evaluated the independent and additive predictive effects of psychological maltreatment on an array of behavioral problems, symptoms, and disorders in a large national sample of clinic-referred children and adolescents drawn from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network Core Data Set (CDS; see Layne, Briggs-King, & Courtois, 2014). We analyzed a subsample of 5,616 youth wi...

متن کامل

Human Cancer Modeling: Recapitulating Tumor Heterogeneity Towards Personalized Medicine

Despite diagnostic, preventive and therapeutic advances, growing incidence of cancer and high rate of mortality among patients affected by specific cancer types indicate current clinical measures are not ideally useful in eradicating cancer. Chemoresistance and subsequent disease relapse are believed to be mainly driven by the cell-molecular heterogeneity of human tumors that necessitates perso...

متن کامل

Human Cancer Modeling: Recapitulating Tumor Heterogeneity Towards Personalized Medicine

Despite diagnostic, preventive and therapeutic advances, growing incidence of cancer and high rate of mortality among patients affected by specific cancer types indicate current clinical measures are not ideally useful in eradicating cancer. Chemoresistance and subsequent disease relapse are believed to be mainly driven by the cell-molecular heterogeneity of human tumors that necessitates perso...

متن کامل

Differences between sexually abused and non-sexually abused adolescent girls in foster care.

This descriptive study examines the differences between sexually abused and non-sexually abused adolescent females in the foster care system who were participating in an independent living program. Fifty-four percent of the 190 girls met the criteria for being categorized as sexually abused. Those who experienced sexual abuse had also experienced significantly more of other types of child maltr...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2005