Early Victimization Research Articles

Childhood Sexual Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, and Partnering with Adult Men: Exploring the Relationship

Although the mechanism by which early victimization, specifically sexual abuse, increases the risk of adolescent pregnancy is unclear, a relationship between previous victimization and adolescent pregnancy has been demonstrated. While partnering with an older man may initially offer the means necessary to escape a neglectful or violent family of origin, this protection be accompanied by an imbalance of power and control. Both adolescent mothers partnered with adult men and adolescent mothers partnered with male peers reported sexual abuse perpetrated by family members, family friends, strangers, and peers. Policies developed to protect young people from victimization, including mandatory reporting and statutory rape laws, should be evaluated for their consistent application to all children, regardless of age, race, gender, or pregnancy status.

Hans-Albert Walter (review)

876 Reviews (p. 197) in her novel Der grofieKrieg in Deutschland, and the lack of stylistic features employed by Doblin (p. 199), appear subjective and simply partisan. It is proof of Wallenstein's complexity that Quack, despite arguing forits coherence, only brieflyseems to hazard an overarching interpretation of it(pp. 281-83). His study makes a compelling case that there is more worthwhile work still to be done. St Hugh's College, Oxford Steffan Davies Deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1950. Vol. 1: Die Vorgeschichte des Exils und seine erste Phase, 1.1: Die Mentalitdt der Weimardeutschen/Die 'Politisierung' der Intellektuellen . By Hans-Albert Walter. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 781 pp. ?99.95. ISBN 3-476-00536-4. When Hans-Albert Walter began publishing his monumental study of German exile literature in the 1970s, the priority for such an enquiry lay with the rehabilitation of authors whose reputations had been blighted or obliterated under National Socialism. The present volume focuses instead on the mentality those authors had brought with them into the Weimar Republic in the firstplace. The motivation for this change is most readily apparent at the points where Walter takes issue with accounts of the Weimar period which German historians have published in the meantime. He finds Heinrich August Winkler's study of the working-class movement (Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegungin der Weimarer Republik, 3 vols (Berlin: Dietz, 1984-87)) incomplete because it discusses events without assessing the mentalities that contributed to their outcomes, while Hagen Schulze (Weimar: Deutschland 191 y-19 33 (Berlin: Severin & Siedler, 1982)) exemplifies a broader tendency to condemn political behaviour in the Weimar period fromthe moral vantage point of historical hindsight. Walter's purpose now is to nurture understanding forpolitical, social, and cultural attitudes which have become foreign to readers who grew up in the post-1945 world, where parliamentary democracy seemed comfortingly stable. Even German intellectuals who are commonly thought of as tenacious opponents of Wilhelmine militarism, he points out, brought with them into the Weimar period a legacy of social conditioning and mental habits which contributed to the reality of a 'Republic without republicans'. Such seemingly diverse figures as Alfred Kerr and Erich Muhsam, the SPD leader Otto Braun, the liberal newspaper-owner Theodor Wolff, and the diarist and professor of Romance literature Victor Klemperer were united by the veneration of authority, hierarchy, and the Obrigkeitsstaat that had been instilled in them, often by violent means, in their youth. The impulse to combat an authoritarianism that was part of their own personalities, Walter argues, led the left-wingjournalist Carl von Ossietzky (like Muhsam, an early victim of Nazi terror) to adopt his rigidly oppositional stance, and the artist George Grosz to produce his venomous anti-militaristic caricatures. Walter peels away the layers oflegend which have hitherto obscured the biographies of prominent anti-Nazis?not only Brecht and the brothers Mann, whose cases are well known, but more particularly Egon Erwin Kisch, who painstakingly concealed his earlier German nationalism, Oskar Maria Graf, who continued to embroider his account of his wartime dissidence well beyond the 1920s, Kurt Tucholsky, who evidently disapproved of the war but focused his wartime effortson securing the continuity of his writing career, and Rene Schickele, who emerges as less ofa political dissenter than is usually supposed. Walter does not aim to discredit such authors, but to dispel commonly held illusions about their attitudes and behaviour. In a similar spirit, he emphasizes that Jewish figures shared the same social conditioning and cultural values as other citizens of the Weimar Republic; and he is trenchant in his critique of political journalism where he recognizes it to be founded on an unrealistic assessment of the circumstances of the time. He shows how cavalier some of MLR, 100.3, 2005 877 the commentaries and satires in Die Weltbuhne could be: Ossietzky was too quick to personalize his criticisms of the establishment, while Tucholsky was too quick to generalize on the basis of particular incidents. By contrast, Walter highlights the virtues of the other major journal on the liberal left, Leopold Schwarzschild's Tagebuch, notably in his discussion of the 'Berliner Blutmai' of 1929, where his analysis of the documentary evidence brings out the obduracy of...

Explaining the link between violence perpetration, victimization and drug use

This study examined relationships between illegal and legal drug use and violence perpetration and victimization as well as possible mediators of these relationships. Subjects were continuation high school students followed prospectively over 5 years. Results indicated that illegal drug use predicted violence and victimization 5 years later and that earlier victimization was also associated with later illegal drug use. A measure intending to tap a psychopharmacological effects system, consistent with its definition in Goldstein's (1985) [Goldstein, P. J. (1985). The drugs/violence nexus: A tripartite conceptual framework. Journal of Drug Issues, 15(4), 493–506] tripartite model, was found to mediate the relationships between illegal drug use and victimization and violence. Results suggest that violence and victimization prevention efforts may benefit by addressing the psychopharmacological effects of adolescent illegal drug use.

A History of Household Government in America

What is household government? To the vast majority of those living in America from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century it was the government. The head of a household, invariably an adult male, had authority over the property, labor, and mobility of not only his minor children but also his wife, servants, slaves, and the occasional debtors, indigents, or orphans the county paid him to board in the absence of institutional facilities. A History of Household Government in America tells the story of the seldom noted expansion and then the dramatic contraction in household authority and the effects these changes had on the governmental system. The disintegration of household powers during the mid-nineteenth century - the household's civil war - is much more central to what makes that period seem modern than industrialization or urbanization. Carole Shammas offers new explanations for why the American household head became such an early victim of household egalitarianism. Previous theories involving the frontier or the Revolution have ignored other factors unique to the American household system such as testamentary freedom, weak lineage controls, and the lack of an established church, all of which left the head vulnerable to challenges by dependents. These factors also affected the development of social services: In the United States, public and private welfare agencies originated largely out of concerns about the adequacy of household management and discipline. Religious rivalries eventually forced a partial return to household solutions through a welfare state system. That history helps explain why even today any departure from heterosexual two-parent family units continues to be viewed as dysfunctional by a significant portion of the population.

Psychosis, victimisation and childhood disadvantage: evidence from the second British National Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity.

Adverse early circumstances may be more common in people who later develop psychotic disorders. To use data from the second British National Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity to examine associations between psychotic disorders and a number of early victimisation experiences. Psychiatric disorders were identified through structured assessment of adults resident in private households in Britain (n=8580). Respondents were asked whether they had experienced selected events displayed on cards. Compared with respondents with other psychiatric disorders or with none, the prevalence of every experience bar one was significantly elevated in those with definite or probable psychosis. The largest odds ratio was for sexual abuse. Controlling for depressed mood somewhat reduced the odds ratios for the individual experiences. In people with psychosis, there is a marked excess of victimising experiences, many of which will have occurred during childhood. This is suggestive of a social contribution to aetiology.

Association between child sexual abuse and sexual revictimization in adulthood among women sex partners of injection drug users.

Community-recruited women (n = 1490) were interviewed about their early and adult sexual victimization histories to determine whether there was an association between child sexual abuse and adult revictimization by sex partners and strangers/nonsex partners. Adolescent sexual abuse, lifetime sex-trading, drug treatment, and mental health treatment were examined as mediating variables. One-fourth of the women had been revictimized (i.e., experienced child sexual abuse and at least one instance of adult sexual victimization). Child sexual abuse was associated with both rape and other sexual victimization by a sex partner in adulthood, as well as adult rape by a stranger/nonsex partner. Drug and mental health treatments reduced abused women's chances of being raped by a sex partner; drug treatment also decreased the likelihood of other sexual victimization by a sex partner. Sex-trading increased abused women's likelihood of rape by a stranger or nonsex partner. Intervention--including drug treatment--can help women with child sexual abuse histories overcome some of the abuse-related sequelae that make them vulnerable to adult revictimization.

Ilse Langner's Amazonen and the Reception of J. J. Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht

AbstractIlse Langner's play Amazonen: Komödie was due to receive its première in April 1933, but became one of the early victims of Nazi theatrical censorship, attracting condemnation for its satirical feminist polemic and its radical reworking of the myth of the Greek victory over the Amazons. This paper explores Langner's play as a response to a highly‐charged debate over the legacy of Johann Jakob Bachofen's theory of ancient matriarchy, in which theorists and writers from all political camps fought over the uses of myth in the modern world. Langner's approach to Bachofen's theory and to this debate demonstrates that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, which are often applied to the debate on myth in the Weimar Republic, do not necessarily do justice to the complexity of pre‐1933 thinking on the place of myth in modernity.

Some observations on health status and economic status

Little empirical research has examined the impact that child maltreatment may have on victims’ long-term socioeconomic well-being. The current study sought to address this gap by exploring the relationship between childhood experiences of abuse and neglect and several indicators of socioeconomic well-being in adulthood.Data from the nationally representative National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) (n = 5004) were analyzed using logistic regression models to examine whether maltreatment in childhood (any maltreatment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, severe neglect, and multiple types of maltreatment) affected employment status, income, and health care coverage in adulthood. Several potential confounds of this relationship were included as covariates in the models, including race, sex, age, and several indicators of childhood socioeconomic status (SES).The results show that adults who had experienced maltreatment differed significantly from non-maltreated adults across each of the socioeconomic domains examined. Effects were additionally found to differ depending on the number of types of maltreatment experienced.Increased rates of unemployment, poverty, and Medicaid usage indicate the significant long-term personal impact of early victimization. They also suggest a substantial societal cost from this problem through lost economic productivity and tax revenue, and increased social spending. Low socioeconomic status among parents has also been identified as a salient risk factor for the perpetration of maltreatment, and, as such, these results indicate a potential mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of violence.The findings from this study suggest that victims of child maltreatment are at increased risk for financial and employment-related difficulties in adulthood. Approximately one million children are identified each year by state agencies as victims of maltreatment in the United States. Many maltreated children, furthermore, go undetected by protective service agencies, indicating the high prevalence of this problem, and underscoring its large economic costs to society. By highlighting the long-term socioeconomic costs of maltreatment, this research should encourage policy makers to focus on improving prevention, intervention, and treatment efforts for victims of abuse and neglect.

Congress, constituency, and jobs: the Superconducting Super Collider, the Space Station, and National Science Policy

This paper examines the very different decisions that occurred with regards to the International Space Station and the Superconducting Super Collider, two major science and engineering projects which marched across the 1980s only to stumble badly in the early 1990s. The Space Station survived its encounter with congressional politics while the physics project was abruptly cancelled. The argument suggested is that constituency politics within Congress drives decisions especially when resources are scarce as happened in the early 1990s when a spending cap on discretionary spending eliminated congressional ability to fund all programs. The space station program under the leadership of NASA was able to solidify its support nationally by the distribution of contracts and other constituency-related efforts. By contrast, the Collider was perceived as a Texas-dominated project with comparatively little benefit to other areas of the country. The result was that the Space Station survived (by a single vote) its encounter with congressional politics while the Collider was cancelled. Arguments about international linkages, constituency benefits and economic competitiveness were put forth by both programs but the Collider essentially was not persuasive. This program was an early victim of the changing nature of American politics and the increasing reluctance to fund large-scale projects outside selected areas and defense.

The Stalking Phenomenon: Trends in European and International Stalking and Harrassment Legislation

AbstractNo Abstract

An early image of apartheid and postapartheid society: Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm

ABSTRACT Although conspicuously missing in discussions of South African antiapartheid literature these days, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was one of the earliest novels to campaign against racial injustice in what was later to become the Republic of South Africa. Capturing a vivid sense of the emotional and psychological toll that apartheid exerted on its earliest victims, Schreiner expressed the grieviances that racial oppression engendered and attempted to nip the evil in the bud. Through examination of her novel and of its relation to later works of fiction from Africa, I argue that though her hope for a liberated future did not materialize in her own lifetime, Schreiner's place in the canon of anti-apartheid literature as well as in feminism, and the historical importance of her example, should be central to any effort to understand literature's contribution to the struggle for a free South Africa.

Explaining Girls' and Women's Crime and Desistance in the Context of Their Victimization Experiences

Recent work illustrates that early childhood victimization and oppressive neighborhood dynamics predict female offending. Revised strain theory is used to illuminate how such early experiences lead White and minority women to initial involvement in crime. Moreover, another developmental perspective, the life course theory, explains how similar adult experiences may lead women toward ongoing persistence or desistance. Using Waves 1 and 7 of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, findings reveal that early childhood victimization, adult racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, and having been a victim of domestic violence explain women's involvement in crime and deviance, whereas desistance processes remain largely unidentified.

The End of a Culture of Impunity in Rwanda? Prosecution of Genocide and War Crimes before Rwandan Courts and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Following the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana in a plane crash on 6 April 1994, Hutu extremists, members of the Presidential Guard, Rwandan army troops, theInterhamwe(‘Those who work together’) militia affiliated to the ruling party, the M.R.N.D. (Mouvement Révolutionaire National pour la Démocratie) and theImpuzamugambi(‘Those with a single purpose’) militia of the extremist CDR Party (Coalition pour la Défense de la République) began the systematic and widespread killings of Tutsi civilians in the capital Kigali. Hutu moderates were also targeted. Early victims of the violence included Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana along with ten Belgian soldiers of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). This incident prompted the withdrawal of UNAMIR which left the perpetrators of the genocide a free rein. Ministers and the President of the Constitutional Court were also killed within hours of the plane crash.

Early Victimization, Drug Use, and Criminality

Comparative analysis of the relative victimization of 1,030 adult male prisoners and 500 adult female prisoners in Texas reveals significant gender differences in childhood and adult maltreatment and subsequent substance use and criminality. Female inmates report significantly more maltreatment as children than do male inmates. Moreover, the maltreatment of women increases when they become adults, whereas the maltreatment of men drops sharply. The study found childhood maltreatment to be more strongly associated with adult depression and substance dependence among women than among men. The severity of substance misuse and problems associated with it are stronger predictors of female rates of criminal activity than male rates. Recent literature from the social sciences is presented to account for the findings. A female empowerment treatment model to help women attain control over their lives is suggested.

Long-term outcomes of early victimization by peers among Japanese male university students: model of a vicious cycle.

For Japanese male university students ( N = 134) as subjects, self-reported victimization by peers during junior high school was correlated with current scores on self-esteem and depression only for subjects who reported low self-esteem and high depression prior to victimization.

Witch-hunt

Oscar-winning director Carl Foreman was an early victim of the informers and blacklisters who rampaged through Hollywood during McCarthy's witch hunt. His son recalls a loyal citizen and man of high principle

Designing Outcome Studies

Methodological issues are addressed for those who design studies that evaluate treatment efficacy among victims of early sexual abuse. Recommendations are provided for ensuring (a) representative samples, (b) stable and valid measures, (c) statistical power and low error rates, (d) treatment integrity, (e) little contamination from therapist effects, (f) protection from unintended experimenter influences, and (g) clinically meaningful findings. It is concluded that at least two lines of integrated inquiry are needed: (a) studies that seek to determine the degree to which responses to early sexual victimization are different from those associated with other early traumas, and (b) studies that seek to understand how well different interventions “fit” the needs and response dispositions of different victims. Both naturalistic and randomized trials designs are adaptable to the developmental level of this field of inquiry.

Relationships of Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse with School Achievement and Self-Concept

Adolescent victims of child sexual abuse suffer through complex problems of vast proportions. Treatment of these victims is a challenging task facing mental health professionals. Few studies have assessed treatment success in child and adolescent sexual abuse cases. The present investigation used a pretest-posttest format with three measures from the Stanford Achievement Test and self-concept (Piers-Harris) scores to assess the effectiveness of 6 months of psychotherapy with sexually abused girls. Social workers led psychotherapeutic groups like those described by Blick and Porter. The groups offered the girls a supportive environment to gain insights into their difficulties. The study used a comparison group based on gender, age, IQ, and socioeconomic status. Results indicated that the early adolescent sexual abuse victims in treatment made significant gains on all measured areas whereas the comparison group's scores did not change significantly.

Serial Rapists and Their Victims: Reenactment and Repetition

The major finding in this study of 41 serial rapists is the large numbers of reported and unreported victims. For over 1200 attempted and completed rapes, there were 200 convictions. The hidden rapes or earliest nonreported victims of these men as boys and adolescents were identified from their families, their neighborhood, and their schools. Examining the possible link between childhood sexual abuse and criminal behavior in this sample of 41 serial rapists, 56.1% were judged to have at least one forced or exploitive abuse experience in boyhood, as compared to a study of 2,972 college males reporting 7.3% experiencing boyhood sexual abuse. Looking within the abused samples, 56.1% of the rapists reported forced sex, compared to the college sample's 30.4%. Also, the rapist sample revealed higher rates of family member as abuser (48.4%), compared to 22.2% for the college sample. Retrospective reconstruction of the sexual activities and assertive behaviors of these men as boys reveals that 51% of the boys reenact the abuse as a preadolescent with their earliest victims being known to them (48% as neighborhood girls), family (25% as sisters), or girlfriend (25%). The onset of rape fantasies in midadolescence (mean age 16.9) crystalizes the earlier sexually initiated behaviors into juvenile behaviors of spying, fetish burglaries, molestations, and rapes. Repetition of these juvenile behaviors set their criminal patters on strangers--their next group of victims. To reduce victimization, serial rapists need to be identified early and stopped. This means acknowledging and reporting boy sexual abuse. This includes being sensitive to the reenactment behaviors noted in the initiated activities of abused children, which in turn need to be differentiated from peer play. Closer attention needs to be paid to families with incest behavior to insure that younger children are protected. Adolescents showing early repetitive juvenile delinquent behaviors must be assessed for physical and sexual abuse, and intervention must be planned to deal with the victimization. In the investigation and apprehension of serial rapists, law enforcement might pay closer attention to fetish burglaries and the spying, secretive behaviors that serve as the prototype for rape behavior.

AIDS and capitalist medicine.

In the spring of 1981, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, began to see an unusual pattern of illnesses. These illnesses were not usually seen in healthy adults but were generally found in individuals who were either very young or very old and who had compromised immune systems. Such diseases as Kaposi's sarcoma (a type of skin cancer), toxoplasmosis (a usually harmless parasitic disease often spread by cats and chickens), thrush and herpes began to appear in patients along with severe weight loss and fevers of unknown origin. Those who had these "opportunistic" infections were unable to shake them and died as a result. The patients in these cases were all healthy and 20 to 40 years old, supposedly the time of greatest health and vigor. As the spring turned to summer and the cool days of fall approached the CDC began to see more and more of these cases concentrated in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Since all the early victims were homosexuals, this cluster began to be referred to as "Gay-related immune deficiency" (GRID) by many although this was never the official name used at the CDC.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.