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Multigenerational sexual abuse: A cognitive developmental approach to understanding mothers' perceptions of self, parenthood, and change
Abstract
This qualitative study focused on mothers who were sexually abused as children and whose children disclosed incest before turning eighteen. It describes the ways nine women between the ages of 30 and 49, who volunteered to be interviewed, discussed their history of multigenerational sexual abuse and its impact on their lives and their parenting. Semi-structured clinical interviews which took approximately two to three hours each, provided the data for the study. The interview questions were divided into three sections. The questions in the first section asked for the participant's ideas about the parenting relationship. The second section included questions about how she discovered and responded to the sexual abuse of her children. The third part asked for information about how her parents responded to her own childhood victimization, and for her ideas about multigenerational patterns of abuse. Each interview was adapted to be sensitive to the emotional needs and level of understanding of each participant. Embedded in the interview questions were two social-cognitive developmental assessments: one which looked for stages of self-understanding, and one which looked for levels of conceptualizations about the parenting relationship. A high level of correspondence was found between the results of the two assessments. The interviews were transcribed and then analyzed in two phases. The theme analysis is a summary of the major relevant content themes which emerged during the early combing of the data. Among these themes are participants' ideas about connections between childhood sexual victimization in their own lives and childhood incest in their children's lives, and their thoughts about breaking multigenerational patterns of abuse. The next phase, the developmental analysis, summarizes and demonstrates how each of the six themes was negotiated by participants at three different stages of social cognitive development. Many consistencies were found in the ways women at each developmental stage described their thoughts and ideas about abuse in both generations. The results speak to the usefulness of social cognitive developmental schemas in explaining and organizing the various ways mothers who are coping with multigenerational victimization make meaning of their experiences. They indicate a strong relationship between social cognitive development and how people understand, recover from, and change patterns of multigenerational sexual abuse in their families. The findings have implications for clinical practice. They suggest that clinicians attempting to facilitate recovery from sexual victimization might better meet the differing needs of clients when equipped with an understanding of the ways in which social cognition develops and has impact on the process.
Subject Area
School counseling|Individual & family studies|Clinical psychology|Social psychology|Womens studies|Sociology
Recommended Citation
Baker, Linda J, "Multigenerational sexual abuse: A cognitive developmental approach to understanding mothers' perceptions of self, parenthood, and change" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9329562.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9329562