Revictimization in women's lives, an empirical and theoretical account of the links between child sexual abuse and repeated sexual violence

In this thesis I analyse the complex phenomenon of revictimization in women's lives--that is, the increased vulnerability of women who have been sexually abused in childhood to further sexual violence. I argue that in order to understand this phenomenon, a larger analysis of the pervasiveness of men's sexual violence towards women must always be kept in view in order to make the social context of revictimization visible, and to avoid lapsing into victim-blaming accounts. To this end, we need to shift the paradigm away from the purely psychological and individualized models which have characterized most of the research in the field to date, to an approach which understands the social forces which shape and constrain women's lives, particularly through the early lessons of accommodation and disempowerment which inhere in men's sexual abuse of children. Drawing on quantitative findings from the Womens Safety Project (Randall and Haskell, 1995), a community based survey of womens experience of violence and abuse, my statistical analysis shows a number of significant findings relating to revictimization and a delineation of its patterns. The first of these is that an early experience of childhood sexual abuse creates a greater likelihood of an adult experience of some form of sexual assault. Second, an experience of child sexual abuse at the level of rape makes it more likely that a woman will have another sexual assault at the level of rape as an adult. Third, 62% of women sexually abused by a family member were revictimized at the level of rape as adults, compared to 40% of women who were sexually abused by a perpetrator outside of their family. Fourth, multiple abuse experiences in childhood are strongly associated with multiple experiences as an adult. Finally, women who had multiple experiences of rape in childhood have the highest percentage of revictimization as adults. In this analysis, then, the most significant variables related to revictimization are incestuous childhood sexual abuse, child sexual abuse at the level of rape and multiple sexual abuse experiences in childhood. Further analysis of these key variables determines that they are, in fact, linked. That is, 63% of women sexually abused by their own family members had also been sexually abused by two or more different perpetrators in childhood, compared to only 25% of the women abused as children by men who were not relatives. This indicates two very significant findings: that revictimization begins in childhood, and that sexual abuse by family members creates a particular vulnerability to revictimization in both childhood and later adulthood. My most significant findings emerged from the regression model which examined the child sexual abuse characteristics, the three traumatic sexualization scales I developed, and subscales from Briere and Runtzs (1989) trauma symptom checklist (TSC-33) on depression and dissociation. From this analysis the three traumatic sexualization scales had the most significance in predicting adult revictimization, supporting my hypothesis that traumatic sexualuation is a significant link to revictimization.