Schools are one of the first and most influential service systems for young refugees. There is a burgeoning interest in developing school-based refugee mental health services, in part to reduce stigma and increase treatment access for this population. Despite the relevance of gaining a better understanding of how refugee students experience schools in resettlement and how this relates to psychosocial adjustment, belonging and connection to school have not been previously investigated among a population of resettled refugees. This study examines school belonging and psychosocial adjustment among a sample of 76 Somali adolescents resettled in the United States. A greater sense of school belonging was associated with lower depression and higher self-efficacy, regardless of the level of past exposure to adversities. Notably, more than one-quarter of the variation in self-efficacy was explained uniquely by a sense of school belonging. School belonging was not significantly associated with posttraumatic stress symptom severity and did not moderate the effect of exposure to adversities on psychological adjustment. These results suggest that investigating ways of improving school experiences would be particularly useful in the effort towards continued development of school-based mental health programs for young refugees.

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Disclosure is a prominent variable in child sexual abuse research, but little research has examined male disclosure experiences. Sixteen male survivors of childhood sexual abuse were interviewed regarding experiences of disclosure. Analytic techniques included a grounded theory approach to coding and the use of conceptually clustered matrices. Participants described distinct personal (e.g., lack of cognitive awareness, intentional avoidance, emotional readiness, and shame), relational (e.g., fears about negative repercussions, isolation), and sociocultural (e.g., lack of acceptance for men to experience or acknowledge victimization) reasons for their struggles with disclosure. These results highlight that barriers to disclosure exist in multiple domains of experience and are encountered across the lifespan. Implications for future research and clinical interventions are discussed.