Nearly one in three child victims of sexual abuse does not disclose their abuse during the investigative interview. The main factors explaining this reluctance include the victim-perpetrator relationship and the feeling of shame. Our previous work suggests that having been led to perform sexual acts towards the perpetrator can also explain the reluctance of some victims to disclose their abuse during the investigative interview (Allard-Gaudreau, Laforest & Cyr, 2021). Specifically, we observed that children who reported having performed such acts, the type of victim that we termed "agentive", are more likely than "non-agentive" victims to avoid naming sexual acts using ellipses.
The objective of the present research is to further explore the impact of the sexual agency on the discourse of child victims of sexual abuse. More precisely, we compared the evaluation of narratives of personal experience of eight "agentive" and eight "non-agentive" victims. Our results show that agentive victims evaluate their story significantly more often than non-agentive victims, i.e. they introduce more propositions that aim to comment on the narrated action (Labov, 1972), such as "I really didn't like that". Moreover, our analysis suggests that they evaluate their story mostly to justify their behaviours and to highlight the fact that they did not initiate or enjoy the sexual acts. This study further supports that having performed sexual acts has an impact on the discourse of child victims. Thus, this phenomenon should be considered by investigators.
Allard-Gaudreau, N., Laforest, M. & Cyr, M. (2021). Les modalités du non-dévoilement dans les récits d'enfants victimes d'agression sexuelle : une étude de l'ellipse narrative. Travaux Neuchâtelois de linguistique, 75(1), 1-19.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (No 3). Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
