First Advisor

Hugo Maynard

Term of Graduation

Fall 1985

Date of Publication

12-6-1985

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Psychology

Department

Psychology

Language

English

Subjects

Mothers and daughters, Incest victims -- Attitudes, Families, Nuclear families

DOI

10.15760/etd.5325

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, 57 pages)

Abstract

Incest, and the problems arising from it, have increasingly come under the scrutiny of therapists and researchers. All family members are affected by incest and all have been studied. Victims are particularly devastated by sexual abuse by a family member but it is a commonly held belief that having a supportive mother can mitigate the trauma a victim experiences. In this study, girls between the ages of ten and eighteen who were the victims of sexual abuse by a father-figure were compared to a group of girls not thought to be incest victims. The incest victims were divided into two groups, those with supportive mothers and those with non-supportive mothers, with support being defined as belief that sexual abuse occurred and action taken to have the offender leave the home. The Family Concept Inventory was the basis of comparison. Family Effectiveness, the degree to which a test taker's ratings of his or her real and ideal families match professional therapists' ratings of the ideal family, and Family Satisfaction, the comparison of the Real and Ideal Family Effectiveness scores, are obtained from the Inventory. There was no statistically significant difference across the three groups 2 on any of the three measures. However, incest victims with non-supportive mothers had significantly lower Real Family Effectiveness scores than did incest victims with supportive mothers and the control group. On Family Satisfaction the scores of incest victims with non-supportive mothers were lower than the scores of incest victims with supportive mothers, but this difference was not statistically significant. Incest victims with non-supportive mothers clearly view their families as less effective than do incest victims with non-supportive mothers and non-incest victims. However, they remain attached to their families and in need of them and cannot bear the thought of losing their families. This may explain, in part, the reason there was not a statistically significant difference in Family Satisfaction between the two groups of incest victims.

Rights

©1985

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/19481

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