Sexually Victimized Children by David Finkelhor

Author:David Finkelhor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1979-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Trauma and Force

If the kind of sexual activity and the duration of the experience do not make it traumatic, then what does? We have shown that the age difference between partners is important, but isn’t there anything in the nature of the occurrence between the partners themselves that affects the child’s feelings?

Indeed, the most important factor in determining the trauma of the experience is an obvious one: was force involved? When it was, respondents reacted to the experiences very negatively. When no force was involved they were much more likely to see the experience as neutral or even positive. Of all the factors we measured, the use of force by the partner explained more of the negative reactions than anything else. For girls, it correlated .53 with trauma.

It is not surprising that force should be such an important factor. Unlike force, sexual activity and duration both are ambiguous in their implications. A longer relationship and one involving intercourse indicate greater intensity. Intensity may be more harmful, but it could also be an indicator in some cases of a positive, or at the least, an ambivalent, bond. In contrast, the presence of force would almost always signal something negative about the relationship. It is a concise symptom of a whole negative context—the reluctance of the child, the pressure exerted by the partner, the difference in power and control. The primary recollection of the child is of the coercion. That there was sex involved is perhaps less important than the fact that there was aggression.

If coercion, not the elaborateness of the sexual activity, is the main traumatic factor, it would appear to contradict one popular theory about the source of trauma in childhood sexual experiences. This theory holds that damage is caused primarily by guilt. The more a child imagines that he or she had complicity in the affair, the more guilty he or she will feel, and the harder it will be to get over the experience (McFarlane, 1978, p. 94).

In this theory a child whose experience was brutal and coerced would be less traumatized than one whose experience was more consensual. The consensual child would have to deal with the idea that he or she somehow caused the experience to happen, with all the attendant self-blame of such a realization. The coerced child, however, would know that the act had been against his or her will, and although perhaps more hurt at first, the child would be spared the long-term harm of guilt and self-doubt (Benward and Densen-Gerber, 1975, p. 11). As one victim put it:

R: If it had been an isolated incident, especially if it had happened when I was so young, I would have understood I had no control. But it lasted so long, and it made me feel there was something in me that made him continue. It was my fault in the sense that this continued. [Armstrong, 1978, p. 175]

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