On the interpretation of pictures with and without a content of child sexual abuse

Objective: The purposes of the three experiments were to validate the possi bility of a picture to evoke the recognition of child sexual abuse, to dete rmine if the picture was anxiety evoking, and to investigate if the content of child sexual abuse would be transferred to a neutral picture. Method: In all three experiments, adult men and women were presented with a drawing intended to depict child sexual abuse, and were requested to inter pret the picture. Experiment 1: Before and after the picture presentation, 226 participants were given a test of anxiety. Experiment 2: After the expo sure of the child abuse picture, 200 new participants were asked to interpr et an innocent child-adult picture. Experiment 3: To complete Experiment 2, 89 new participants were asked to interpret the pictures in the reverse or der. Results: Almost three-fourths of the participants saw child sexual abuse in the picture with a sexual threat. Those in Experiment 1 who saw the pictur e as child sexual abuse or as a problematic child-adult situation without s exual implications reported a significant increase of anxiety level. None i n Experiment 2 or 3 saw child sexual abuse in the innocent picture. The sex of the abused child was significantly more often interpreted as opposite t o one's own sex. Conclusions: The study indicates some people's deficient capacity to recogn ize the message of child sexual abuse in the picture. It seems that certain people can spare themselves anxiety by not registering the child's precari ous situation or not seeing the child as being of their own sex. This has i mplications for the recognition of child sexual abuse in society. It was al so shown that a sexual abuse theme was not transferred from one context to another context, which immediately followed it. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science L td. All rights reserved.