The Voices of Victims: Surviving Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

This exploratory project had two goals: (1) to ask child and adolescent sexual abuse victims/survivors what they believed counseling and/or therapy designed to help them should entail; and (2) to learn from survivors how others (e.g., parents, social service workers, law enforcement, siblings, etc.) may have helped them deal with the negative impact of child sexual abuse victimization. A focus group methodology, using thematic analysis, was used to learn about how child and adolescent sexual abuse survivors saw these matters and to evaluate the usefulness of focus groups with this population.