Exploring Mental Health Adjustment of Children Post Sexual Assault in South Africa

Large numbers of children are affected by child sexual abuse in South Africa. This study aimed to assess psychological adjustment of children post sexual assault. In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with caretakers, and structured interviews using mental health assessment screening tools were given to children at three intervals over a five-month period after presentation at a sexual assault center. Almost half of the children met clinical criteria for anxiety, and two-thirds met criteria for full symptom post-traumatic stress disorder two to four weeks post disclosure. With standard care, we observed some recovery; 43.3% of children still met full symptom post-traumatic stress disorder nearly six months postdisclosure. Our findings indicate that current practice in South Africa does not promote adequate recovery for children.     

A Psychosocial Understanding of Child Sexual Abuse Disclosure Among Female Children in South Africa

Child sexual abuse is endemic in South Africa, driven by high levels of gender-based violence and underscored by structural and social factors. This article aims to develop an understanding of the process of disclosure in a sample of female children and their caregivers. In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with 31 female children aged 8–17 years and their caregivers at 3 intervals after presentation to a sexual assault treatment center. Nearly half of the children failed to disclose the sexual abuse immediately, fearing caregivers’ reaction. Most children purposefully disclosed to a confidant through a process of identifying an intermediary to tell caregivers on their behalf. The process of disclosure was influenced by multiple factors, such as a fear of the caregiver’s reaction and disbelief, which is related to parental style. Disclosure was found to be a dynamic process that unfolds and not a single or static event and influenced by multiple factors which all impact on recovery. Our findings highlight the need to address social norms on sexual abuse in order to improve responses to disclosure to facilitate post-sexual-abuse adjustment for the child and the family.     

Youth Advisors Driving Action: hearing the youth voice in mental health systems of care

The Children's Mental Health Initiative (CMHI) is funded by the Center for Mental Health Services within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. CMHI assists communities in developing comprehensive, coordinated services for children with serious emotional disturbances and their families. Broadly speaking, these systems are designed to be child centered, youth guided, family driven, community based, and culturally competent. To assure implementation of the "youth-guided" core value in the national evaluation, an advisory group of youth coordinator/youth teams representing communities across the country was developed. This group chose the name YADA-Youth Advisors Driving Action. YADA has made a substantive contribution to national evaluation efforts by bringing the youth perspective and voice to its audience at the community and national levels. This article describes YADA's founding and development, as well as related implications for psychosocial nurses.     

Towards Reconceptualizing Political Action*

The discipline of sociology faces important challenges that may result in a transformation of the field. For example, the practice of specialization potentially takes on a new meaning in the context of growing interdisciplinary studies, the growth of feminist scholarship, and renewed efforts at micro-macro linkages. In essence, more comprehensive accounts of social phenomena are made possible as a result of these trends. This paper examines the way in which such approaches may lead to advances in the study of political action.     

Domestic violence and child abuse: developing sensitive policies and guidance

Domestic violence is everywhere and nowhere. No statutory organization or health service has work with either perpetrators or survivors of domestic violence (usually women and children) as the primary focus of their service, yet all agencies will have very significant numbers among their clients/service users. It is therefore crucial that the policy framework is developed both within and between agencies to address the need, and scope, of intervention in this area and particularly the impact on children. Currently, significant steps have been taken by some agencies in the UK to address this previously neglected issue, though the developments are patchy. This paper draws on a UK‐wide research study which mapped the extent and range of service provision for families where there is domestic violence and also developed a framework of good practice indicators for provision in this area. This article examines one of the indicators of good practice arising from the research—that of policy development—within social service departments and within the multi‐agency arena. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating Public Charity Websites

In this study, we explore nonprofit website development by applying two different types of website assessment tools to US charity websites. One instrument is theoretically based in nonprofit tendencies; the other is a commercial automated service. The results of these evaluation tools are further analyzed to determine whether the instruments are sufficiently independent for evaluation of nonprofit websites. The results illuminate differences in the assessment tools, finding them to be complementary. Each method offers different insights into website development deficiencies and avenues for improvement.     

Higher education students as political actors: evidence from England and Ireland

Higher education (HE) students have often been viewed as important political actors in wider society, stemming largely from their activities in the 1960s. Nevertheless, like much of the literature on youth political participation, research has rarely explored the extent to which student political participation varies across nation-states. This article begins to redress this gap by drawing upon data collected from focus groups with undergraduate students in England and Ireland, alongside an analysis of relevant policy documents from both countries. Overall, we argue that, whilst English and Irish students expressed similar desires to be politically active, they differed in the extent to which they felt empowered to take up such roles and the perceived scope of their influence. Similar differences were evident, to some extent, in the way in which students’ political activity was seen by policymakers. These cross-national differences are explained with reference to contextual factors and, in particular, variation in the degree of HE marketisation in the two countries. There is also evidence to suggest that students are sensitive to the way in which they are constructed in policy, which affects their sense of themselves as political actors.     

Intimate partner violence: prevalence and risk factors for men in Cape Town, South Africa

This study examined the prevalence of and risk factors for intimate partner physical violence against women. Interviews were conducted with a sample of 1,378 men working in Cape Town municipalities. An average of 42.3% (95% CI: 39.6, 44.8) reported physical violence against a partner of the last 10 years, and 8.8% (95% CI: 7.3, 10.3) reported physical violence in the past year. After adjustment for age, occupational group, and race, the factors associated with use of violence against partners of the last 10 years were having no post-school training (OR = 2.10), witnessing parental violence in childhood (OR = 1.87), involvement in fights at work (OR = 2.73) and in communities (OR = 1.54), drug use (OR = 1.99), problem alcohol use (OR = 1.98), perceiving hitting women to be acceptable (OR = 4.54), frequent conflict (OR = 2.40), women's alcohol use (OR = 2.25), conflict about sex (OR = 2.16), and conflict about his infidelity (OR = 2.81). The study shows that ideas supportive of gender inequality and normative use of violence in different settings are major underlying factors for men's violence against partners.     

An Integrated Text Analytic Framework for Product Defect Discovery

The recent surge in the usage of social media has created an enormous amount of user‐generated content (UGC). While there are streams of research that seek to mine UGC, these research studies seldom tackle analysis of this textual content from a quality management perspective. In this study, we synthesize existing research studies on text mining and propose an integrated text analytic framework for product defect discovery. The framework effectively leverages rich social media content and quantifies the text using various automatically extracted signal cues. These extracted signal cues can then be used as modeling inputs for product defect discovery. We showcase the usefulness of the framework by performing product defect discovery using UGC in both the automotive and the consumer electronics domains. We use principal component analysis and logistic regression to produce a multivariate explanatory analysis relating defects to quantitative measures derived from text. For our samples, we find that a selection of distinctive terms, product features, and semantic factors are strong indicators of defects, whereas stylistic, social, and sentiment features are not. For high sales volume products, we demonstrate that significant corporate value is derivable from a reduction in defect discovery time and consequently defective product units in circulation.