The effects of child sexual abuse: Comment on Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman (1998).

Abstract

B. Rind, P. Tromovitch, and R. Bauserman (1998) examined the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) by meta-analyzing studies of college students. The authors reported that effects "were neither pervasive nor typically intense" and that "men reacted much less negatively than women" (p. 22) and recommended value-neutral reconceptualization of the CSA construct. The current analysis revealed numerous problems in that study that minimized CSA-adjustment relations, including use of a healthy sample, an inclusive definition of CSA, failure to correct for statistical attenuation, and misreporting of original data. Rind et al.'s study's main conclusions were not supported by the original data. As such, attempts to use their study to argue that an individual has not been harmed by sexual abuse constitute a serious misapplication of its findings.

Young Women's Social and Occupational Development and Mental Health in the Aftermath of Child Sexual Abuse

“…The effect sizes for both young women and men observed in this study were substantially larger than those typically found for the vast majority of more proximate negative life events occurring in adulthood (Aseltine and Kessler 1993;Kessler and McLeod 1984;McLeod and Kessler 1990), which range between a quarter and a third of a standard deviation. Consequently our research informs the debate over the controversial findings of Rind et al (1998) who concluded in a recent meta-analysis that the effect of CSA on young adults' adjustment is actually quite small (e.g., Dallam et al 2001;Ondersma et al 2001;Rind et al 2001). Our study is particularly relevant to this debate because we address two of the principal criticisms of Rind et al's research: that studies using college samples may include only the highest functioning youths experiencing CSA, and that the wide range of abuse definitions found in the metaanalyses have diluted calculations of the impact of traumatic sexual victimization.…”

Sexual Abuse in Childhood and Physical and Mental Health in Adulthood: An Australian Population Study

“…Some have argued that the traumatic impact of childhood sexual abuse has been overstated (Rind, Tromovitch, & Bauserman, 1998) while others have contended that those experiencing sexual abuse report numerous detrimental effects (Dallam et al, 1998;Paolucci, Genuis, & Violato, 2001). Generally, data derived from clinical samples (Brown & Anderson, 1991;Bryer, Nelson, Miller, & Krol, 1987) suggest high levels of health impairment following sexual abuse while data derived from population studies raise the possibility that many of those experiencing sexual abuse are resilient (Mullen, Martin, Anderson, Romans, & Herbison, 1993) or that the apparent association between abuse and health is attributable to other factors (Rind et al, 1998).…”

Assessment of the Harmful Psychiatric and Behavioral Effects of Different Forms of Child Maltreatment

“…Although early literature reviews concluded that child sexual abuse predicts a range of psychiatric outcomes, 4–6 more recent meta-analyses based on community samples 7 and college samples 8 suggest that child sexual abuse is weakly associated with later adjustment problems. Unsurprisingly, these findings are controversial 9 , and have been criticized 10,11 and defended 12,13 on several occasions.…”