Download the thesis - South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault

and increased negative symptoms (171).
Brid Featherstone’s essay on women’s involvement in childhood sexual abuse from the
positions of mother and social worker points to fantasies of an essential harmony
existing between mother and child which, when disrupted, can be restored. In the
discussion, she addresses a number of reasons why mothers feel ambivalent about the
needs of their children and draws heavily on feminist literature to describe how power
imbalances between the sexes can inform this behaviour and lead women to abandon
their responsibilities by failing to protect. She cites reasons such as the mother also
being a victim of abuse and viewing one task of the mother as being to induct her
daughter into meeting the needs of others (179). Both Featherstone and Michael
Karson are reluctant to “mother blame” as both see this as being essentially unhelpful
and recognise that the dynamics of the family are usually more complex than is often
claimed. Blaming can lead to the family closing ranks, thereby preventing help and
change (Karson 144). Featherstone also draws attention to the understandable
anxiety of feminists that avoiding “motherblaming” may lead to a tendency to assume
the mother carries no responsibility at all (Featherstone 173).
David Finkelhor and Angela Browne devised a model suggesting that CSA affects
children through four main mechanisms: traumatic sexualisation, betrayal,
stigmatisation and powerlessness. Gold, following Finkelhor, argues that CSA
transcends PTSD with victims showing a range of symptoms of extensive “cognitive
distortions” (13). In the index of distortions, and witnessed in the research
participants, Gold includes: damaged self-perception leading to feelings of being
different from others; alterations to consciousness known as dissociation, where
victims disconnect body, mind and feeling; affect and impulse regulation; the loss of
systems of meaning; and disrupted interpersonal relationships. Very low self-esteem
reflected in the incapacity to feel legitimate entitlement or to self-assert is a burden
victims commonly carry. Briere’s interpretation of the effects of abuse includes a
chronic perception of danger, preoccupation with control, dissociative behaviours and
negative self-evaluation.
Victims of childhood sexual assault are traumatised during fundamental and important
periods of their development, when assumptions of the self, others and the world
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