The Discursive Construction of Gendered Attributions of Blame for Child Sexual Abuse: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Maternal Failure to Protect in Child Welfare Policy and Practice
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Nonoffending mothers of children who have been sexually victimized have historically borne the burden of blame in professional and public discourse. Notwithstanding strong empirical evidence to the contrary, attributions of maternal culpability for the inception and maintenance of abuse dynamics have been socially manufactured through hegemonic paradigms of deficient mothering. While insinuations of conscious or unconscious maternal collusion may have dissipated since early psychoanalytic and family systems eras, the legacy of mother-blame lives on in present day child welfare policies and practices through the ideologically- and institutionally-entrenched doctrine of failure to protect. \nWith the intent of unearthing gender-based power asymmetries in contemporary child welfare system responses to child sexual abuse, this doctoral study applied feminist critical discourse analysis to investigate discursive constructions of blame and failure to protect, as enacted, reinforced, and resisted through the powerful language of child welfare policy and practice texts. In this multimodal, problem-oriented, social advocatory approach to critical social science research, descriptive, interpretive, and explanatory analyses of semiotic data were conducted to expose transparent and opaque orders of discourse that legitimize particular relations of power and authority in child welfare operating to the detriment of women and children.\nAnchored in neoliberal modes of governing, child-centric notions of best interests, and hierarchical structures of power, this study uncovered dominant ideologies of gender and motherhood that function to construct women as the embodiment of sexual abuse risk, target of scrutiny and blame, and primary agent of change. Judged against naturalized schemas of good mothering in isolation of subjective lived experiences, social locations, and material conditions, failure to protect standards have an inherently disproportionate and troubling effect on women, particularly marginalized women who endure intersecting sources of oppression and adversity. Consequent formulations of child sexual abuse as a corollary of maternal inadequacies and defective instincts wrongly, albeit effectually, deflect the gaze away from sexual abuse perpetrators, nonoffending fathers, unresponsive institutions, and profound social injustices. Mothers are fundamental to the collective goal of promoting children’s safety and recovery in the aftermath of sexual abuse. Prevailing child welfare narratives that blame and shame paradoxically impede maternal capacities for support and protection and, thus, compromise children’s best interests. \nGendered child welfare discourse has proven itself to be remarkably impervious to change. This study effectively problematized and destabilized its stronghold on child welfare policy and practice by unmasking and denaturalizing the ideological content of textually mediated discourses, building a persuasive case for social and institutional reform grounded in a solid epistemic and evidentiary foundation, and proposing progressive avenues for discursive resistance, negotiation, and transformation.
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Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».