The Effects of Disclosing Childhood Sexual Abuse On Adult Women's Experiences of Sexual Revictimization

Background and Significance: Clinicians and researchers generally agree that women who are sexually and/or physically victimized as adults may have histories of childhood sexual maltreatment as well, perhaps resulting in challenges with identifying prevention and intervention strategies for subsequent revictimization incidents. How the dynamics in this pathway from childhood to adult victimization unfold and what specific factors are most frequent and influential in the process, however, have not received extensive empirical examination. A key area of inquiry in this study centers around the process of disclosure to the early childhood abuse and how the factors related to this earlier disclosure predicted both later revictimization in adulthood and the attendant disclosure of this subsequent event. We used retrospective data from a sample of adult women in the community to examine the relationship between the experience and disclosure of childhood sexual abuse and subsequent adult sexual violence. Methods: The study sample contained adult women (n = 243) who were from various community settings--recipients of services related to sexual assault and domestic violence, inmates at a state prison, and general community respondents. Over 95% of this sample had experienced both childhood and adulthood sexual abuse. Linkages between these childhood and adult assault experiences were examined, particularly on the impact of childhood disclosure on adult revictimization and on how adult women disclosed these subsequent experiences. Results: A logistic regression analysis demonstrated that the sole significant factor related to childhood sexual abuse disclosure was whether or not physical force accompanied the abuse (OR = 2.53). OLS regression analyses revealed that physical force also predicted later victimization (â = 2.65; p < .001); the childhood abuse occurring in the latency age period was the second significant predictor (â = 1.37; p < .01). In the OLS regression model that was erected to examine adult disclosures, two significant predictors were the level of sexual revictimization (â = 1.33; p < .001) and having disclosed the earlier abuse in childhood, yet there was no action following this disclosure (â = 2.05; p < .05). Implications: The pathway between childhood sexual abuse and later revictimization is complicated; with respect to adulthood disclosure, the lack of response to the disclosure during the earlier trauma partially predicted disclosure to the adulthood sexual trauma. In addition, the study results document that social workers and counselors constitute a large portion of the confidants for childhood sexual abuse disclosures. Understanding how to elicit disclosures from children who have been sexually abused and how this informs their adult functioning in response to later trauma is a critical area of social workers' clinical training. However, recent research also documents that specializing and focused training on these types of traumas is frequently absent in many social work education programs.