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Betrayal trauma describes the kind of trauma that is interpersonal in nature (such as child sexual abuse; CSA), and involves traumas wherein one human intentionally harms another human. In contrast, emotional betrayal is the experience of feelings and emotions that result from the betrayal trauma. Whereas the phenomenon of betrayal trauma has been well-researched (Freyd et al., 2007), emotional betrayal resulting from betrayal trauma is less examined in the literature. Emotional betrayal has been shown to predict PTSD symptoms (Cantón-Cortés, et al., 2011), and is associated with issues in survivors’ current/future relationships (Guyon et al., 2021; Kallstrom-Fuqua et al., 2020). The purpose of the current study was to develop and psychometrically validate a new measure to assess feelings of emotional betrayal from child sexual abuse (EBSCAM) in adult survivors.
Methods
After obtaining University Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for the online questionnaire, the researcher emailed the webmasters of 88 unique CSA survivor websites to ask if they would allow a link to the study to be posted on their website. If they agreed, the researcher emailed them the link and the web masters posted it on their websites. Potential participants then clicked on the link to the study to participate. This study included 342 anonymous participants of all genders.
Measures
The Emotional Betrayal from Child Sexual Abuse Measure (EBCSAM) assesses for feelings of emotional betrayal resulting from CSA. The original measure had sixteen questions, two of which were open-ended, six were dichotomous (yes/no), and the rest were Likert-scaled questions.
Results
The 342 participants were randomly split in two files using the split file command in SPSS to create one set of cases for the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA; n=161) and a second for the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA; n=143). While there were originally 16 survey items, the Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) suggest that the categorical items were not a valid way of assessing feelings of betrayal. Instead, the statistical analyses guided us towards a shortened version of the EBCSM, with two factors (Perpetrator Betrayal, and Environmental Betrayal), and this final version showed good internal consistency, and high reliability. The Chronbach’s alpha for the 6 items in the scale was .85. Results of the EFA suggested a two-factor solution that together accounted for 74.18% of the variance. The final model produced fit statistics that exceed established norms (CFI=.99; TLI=.99; RMSEA=.05; SRMR = .03).
Conclusions and Implications
This short measure yields a reliable clinical picture of the client who feels betrayed, as well as the environment that allowed the abuse to happen. The revised EBSCAM has two latent factors: Emotional Betrayal by the Perpetrator (Perpetrator Betrayal), and Emotional Betrayal by the People in the Victim’s Environment (Environmental Betrayal). The understanding of a survivor’s sense of emotional betrayal from CSA is an important task in research and treatment with survivors of CSA. This reliable and valid measure may be used for research, clinical assessment, and therapeutic treatment of survivors of child sexual abuse.