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