Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to investigate factors that influence the believing of child sexual abuse (CSA) disclosures. CSA is a major public health issue (WHO, 2002). Approximately one third of females and one sixth of boys will be sexually abused before the age of 18 (Kendall-Tackett, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993), yet most victims do not disclose the abuse until long after it occurred, if ever (London, Bruck, Ceci, & Shuman, 2005). Not disclosing has many deleterious effects for victims including not stopping chronic abuse and not receiving therapeutic interventions (Ullman, 2003). Fear of not being believed is a major deterrent against disclosure (Goodman-Brown, Edelstein, Goodman, Jones, & Gordon, 2003) and not being believed when one discloses has negative psychological and physiological health effects (Ullman, 2003). Therefore, the question about factors that influence believing disclosures is related to public health.

This study, conducted with a sample of college students in a university Human Subjects Pool, varied types of trauma disclosed and studied different factors about the perceiver in order to investigate influences on believing. It also experimentally manipulated exposure to educational material and information about CSA in order to determine the malleability of participants' beliefs about CSA. It was found that males without a history of high betrayal trauma were more skeptical of CSA disclosures than other participants, and that they believed other types of trauma as much as did other participants. Males endorsed more beliefs in CSA myths and were also more sexist on both Old Fashioned and Modern Sexism measures. There was a significant interaction for experimental condition and gender. Males in the ideal experimental condition of two educational sources of unbiased information about CSA had a reduction in CSA myths and increased beliefs in CSA disclosures. Finally, there was an experimental investigation into the effectiveness of debriefing, which found a strong main effect for debriefing and an interaction with gender. Males who read about rape in one of the experimental conditions and who were not debriefed demonstrated a backlash reaction to CSA myths in that they more strongly believed the myths than did the rest of the sample. Males who read about rape and who were debriefed experienced the opposite effect.