Victims of child sexual abuse : who's responsible and who's believable?

Abstract

This thesis investigates whether perpetrator-victim and counsellor characteristics influence counsellors' views of victim responsibility and credibility. Counsellors (n=149) surveyed by mail and over the internet read a vignette describing an incident of CSA, completed a 12-question survey along a 7-point Likert-type scale, responded to 2 open-ended discussion questions, and completed a demographic survey. Results from a logistic regression analysis found that: victim gender predicted views of victim responsibility for boys; more years of counselling experience predicted the disbelief of CSA disclosures; and more years experience counselling CSA clients predicted credibility of CSA disclosures. Early feminist works on CSA are used to argue that transgressions of gender norms elicit interpretations of victims that realign their behaviour with patriarchal ideals of femininity and masculinity. However, the existence of various gender pairings of perpetrator-victim relationships suggest that my findings support a revised view of patriarchy that is more in line with intersectional feminist literature.