“It’s Complicated Because We’re Only Sixteen”: A Framework for Understanding Childhood Sexual Abuse Disclosures to Peers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The process of disclosing childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is very difficult for young people. Researchers have consistently found that young people disclose CSA to other youth at much higher rates than to familiar adults or authorities and indicate that CSA remains largely unknown to adults. However, no study to date has focused exclusively on understanding the process of youth-directed disclosures from young people's perspectives. Using grounded theory methodology, this qualitative study aimed to understand the process of CSA disclosures to peers based on interviews with 30 young people from Canada and Ireland who have experienced CSA. The findings reflect the iterative and dialogical nature of the peer disclosure process and provide a framework for youth-directed disclosures that is centered on the theme of uncertainty. An underlying sense of uncertainty permeated the entire disclosure experience as participants' narratives reflected six stages that were interrelated in a cyclical process: experiencing internal conflict, needing to tell and choosing to confide in peers, expecting emotional support from peers, gradual telling and making sense of the abuse, burden on peers, and assessing peer responses and further disclosures. In addition, this model was not static, as with time, participants reinterpreted their peers' responses. The presented framework is consistent with previous conceptualizations of CSA disclosures, but the focus on youth-directed disclosures from the perspective of young people also allowed for a model that explains processes that are unique to peer disclosures. Practice and policy implications as well as limitations and future research directions are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".