School Professionals' Attributions of Blame for Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

This article reports the results of two studies comparing school professionals' attributions of blame to a child victim, a father/perpetrator, and a nonparticipating mother in hypothetical vignettes of father–daughter incest. Vignettes depicted a 10-year-old female responding in an encouraging, passive, or resistant manner to her father's sexual advances. Results from both studies indicate that participants assigned significantly more blame to encouraging victims than to passive and resistant victims. All professional groups (i.e., school psychologists, teachers, school counselors, and principals) assigned some degree of blame to the child victim and nonparticipating mother, and they assigned very much or total blame to the father. Participants with less traditional gender role attitudes assigned less blame to the child. In Study 2, participants who reported a personal history of child sexual abuse (CSA) attributed less blame to the child, and participants who assigned some level of blame to the child were older and had received less hours of formal course training in CSA compared with participants who assigned no blame. The results of these studies support the need to educate school professionals about the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome and the importance of not attributing blame to child victims regardless of their behavioral presentation.