Sharon Lamb

Aspects of Disclosure Mediators of Outcome of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This research investigates the relationship between disclosure and adult outcome. In the study, 60 volunteers completed a phone interview regarding their history of sexual abuse, history of repeated disclosures, and current socioemotional functioning. Number of disclosures and number of positive disclosures were not related to adult functioning as measured by the Brief Symptom Inventory. Reactions to adulthood disclosure were perceived as significantly more helpful than reactions to childhood disclosures. Across all explored disclosures, the more direct the disclosure, the more negative the reaction. It is unclear, based on the lack of findings in this study, whether revealing sexual abuse has a healing effect.

“Normal” childhood sexual play and games: Differentiating play from abuse

Recent recognition of child-to-child and adolescent-to-child sexual abuse raises the question, for the courts, educators, clinicians, and lay individuals, where do we draw the line between normal childhood sexual play, and abuse. This paper presents the results of a survey on normative childhood sexual play and games experiences that was distributed to 300 undergraduates at an all womens college. One hundred-twenty-eight returned the survey, 85% of whom described a childhood sexual game experience. Of these women, 44% described cross-gender play and there was a trend for women who had described cross-gender experiences to have seen the play as involving persuasion, manipulation, or coercion. A strong relationship was found between abuse and cross-gender play. Level of physical involvement in the game was correlated with perceptions of normality. A typology of six kinds of sexual play experiences was derived. Results are discussed in terms of their relation to differentiating childhood sexual abuse from play and gender socialization influences relating to the role rehearsal of coercive or manipulative relationships.

BLAMING THE PERPETRATOR Language that Distorts Reality in Newspaper Articles on Men Battering Women

In an earlier article, Lamb (1991) showed that journal authors, when writing about men battering women, wrote in a way that avoided assigning responsibility to men as perpetrators, and that this kind of writing was more common among male authors as well as female authors who wrote with men. This study examines first whether this kind of writing occurs in newspaper articles on men battering women, and whether two problematic styles of writing have an effect on the reader. Three versions of a newspaper article were developed to differentiate active voice, passive voice, and writing that implies shared responsibility for a mans violence. One hundred and eighty subjects read one of the three versions and endorsed one of five possible punishments for the man in the story who had been violent. Results showed that subjects did not differ in their selection of punishments for the active voice versus the passive voice version, but were much more lenient towards the man after reading the shared responsibility version.

Internal state words : their relation to moral development and to maternal communications about moral development in the second year of life

This paper, through a longitudinal study of four toddlers, examines the regularities in order and age of acquisition of internal state words in relation to emergence of signs of moral awareness and affect. Increases in internal state words occurred after childrens peaks in awareness of standards and after the first signs of empathy. Maternal communications about awareness of standards appeared to increase and decrease in a pattern suggesting they were following their childrens development. Maternal use of internal state words was rare and did not appear directly to promote childrens acquisition of them. Results are discussed in terms of conceptual growth motivating language acquisition.

First Moral Sense: an examination of the appearance of morally related behaviours in the second year of life

Abstract While there has been considerable observational work demonstrating that children in the second year of life show signs of moral development, few studies have commented on the nature of the emergence of these signs. This paper, through a longitudinal study of four toddlers, examines the emergence of several signs of moral awareness and their relation to maternal communications that promote moral awareness. The four toddlers showed peaks in behaviours relating to moral awareness around 17‐18 months. These peaks appeared to emerge independent of language acquisition. Maternal communications about moral events increased after or at the same time as the toddlers’ peaks. These findings are discussed in terms of a maturational argument for the emergence of moral awareness.

Rape Victims in Court: Balancing Stereotypes, Identity, and Justice

privilege, and equality are never addressed, and feminist theorists and perspectives receive specific attention in only three pages throughout the text. An additional problem is the separated discussion of Roberts’s Seven-Stage Crisis Intervention Model and his Woman-Battering Continuum; his two models appear in almost every chapter throughout the book. The theoretical models presented are very limited, with little coverage of other models in the field. Furthermore, the book is theoretically rooted solely in cognitive and cognitive-behavioral approaches. This volume would have been strengthened by either inclusion of additional theoretical approaches or a specific framing of the text as one primarily aligned with cognitive and cognitivebehavioral theories. In addition, greater attention to treatment evaluation and programmatic assessment of interventions, as well as inclusion of prevention efforts, would have strengthened the text. Finally, in comparison to other books, it is unclear how this text is markedly different from a 2002 book edited by Roberts, titled Handbook of Domestic Violence Intervention Strategies: Policies, Programs, and Legal Remedies. In terms of more feminist-based scholarship in this area, interested readers may choose Hamel and Nicholls’s edited text, Family Interventions in Domestic Violence: A Handbook of Gender-Inclusive Theory and Treatment. Nevertheless, because of the continued high incidence of interpersonal relationship violence and violence within families, books like Battered Women and Their Families are always quite timely and will likely be well received. Overall, Roberts provides a foundational read with his compilation, Battered Women and Their Families: Intervention Strategies and Treatment Programs. The book is likely useful for those early in their exposure to domestic violence and treatment strategies.