Healing from childhood sexual abuse: a theoretical model

Childhood sexual abuse is a prevalent social and health care problem. The processes by which individuals heal from childhood sexual abuse are not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to develop a theoretical model to describe how adults heal from childhood sexual abuse. Community recruitment for an ongoing broader project on sexual violence throughout the lifespan, referred to as the Sexual Violence Study, yielded a subsample of 48 women and 47 men who had experienced childhood sexual abuse. During semistructured, open-ended interviews, they were asked to describe their experiences with healing from childhood sexual abuse and other victimization throughout their lives. Constructivist grounded theory methods were used with these data to develop constructs and hypotheses about healing. For the Sexual Violence Study, frameworks were developed to describe the participants' life patterns, parenting experiences, disclosures about sexual violence, spirituality, and altruism. Several analytic techniques were used to synthesize the findings of these frameworks to develop an overarching theoretical model that describes healing from childhood sexual abuse. The model includes four stages of healing, five domains of functioning, and six enabling factors that facilitate movement from one stage to the next. The findings indicate that healing is a complex and dynamic trajectory. The model can be used to alert clinicians to a variety of processes and enabling factors that facilitate healing in several domains and to guide discussions on important issues related to healing from childhood sexual abuse.     

Book Review: Who Sprawls Most? How Growth Patterns Differ Across the U.S. William Fulton,Rolf Pendall,Mai Nguyen,and Alicia Harrison. Washington,DC: The Brookings Institution,July 2001 (www.brook.edu/urban/fulton%2d pendall.htm)

Population and Environment -     

Combining key elements in training and research: Developing social work assessment theory and practice in partnership

This paper is based on a joint project between staff from a university department of social work and a local social services department and is jointly written by the four people involved. It reports on the development of a package of training and research over the past 5 years designed to improve standards of assessment in the work of child and family social workers employed by the authority. It analyses the positive reception given to the project both from practising social workers and from management. It contends that this model of combining theory, training, research and practice can and should be used more widely as a basis for supporting and developing professional social work. It discusses the introduction of a theoretical framework which anticipated the new national framework for assessment, but which has been used to critically assess it (as well as other models of assessment), and has involved experienced workers in their evaluation.     

ADJUSTING TO UNCERTAINTY: COPING STRATEGIES AMONG THE DISPLACED AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA

This study examined the coping strategies of individuals displaced after Hurricane Katrina. Following the evacuation of New Orleans, surveys were administered to those individuals displaced by Katrina and relocated to shelters or in Disaster Centers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Lansing, Michigan; different parts of Indiana and Kentucky; and federal aid distribution centers throughout Texas. Results indicated that talking, staying informed, and praying emerged as predictors of changes in psychological stress during relocation. Differences emerged in coping strategies based on gender, race, and income; however, age did not emerge as a factor. Recommendations are made to use these results for postcrisis response and coordination.     

Freedom's Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War

This essay analyses the pervasive discourse of freedom mobilised by the US Administration of George W. Bush, locating its roots not only in post-1945 American foreign policy, but in powerful metanarratives of US exceptionalism and destiny and overarching Western concepts of enlightenment, sovereignty, historical progress, reason of state and secular modernity. Hence freedom is revealed not as a set of democratic liberties guaranteed and enabled by the state—as in familiar liberal-humanist accounts—but as a form of license, a series of capacities and powers to make, use and act without constraint. By tracing this onto-technology of freedom through US history, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and considering its functional mirroring by the Islamist threat of the new terrorism, the essay exposes the multiple dangers posed by the aggressive assertion of a simultaneously instrumental and universalising image of historical action and inevitability that rejects any restriction of its powers and any responsibility for their effect. It concludes by speculating upon a recuperated, and fundamentally social, concept of freedom characterised by interdependence, responsibility and contingent action, one that might one day return to freedom the honour of its name.