Out for Vengeance and Offering Forgiveness: How Adolescent Survivors Make Sense of Childhood Abuse

• In Event: Child Sexual Abuse: Preventing Harm and Helping Survivors

Abstract

Purpose: This paper examines how 17 adolescents made sense of being abused as children and uncovers what they wanted from those around them. To date, most research regarding the interests of child abuse (CA) survivors has been conducted with adults. Consequently, the study fills a gap in our knowledge by offering a youth-centered view of CA survivors' interests and needs.
Study design: The data come from an ethnographic study of a group counseling program for high school students in Hawaiʻi. During the study, I got to know and conducted in-depth interviews with 17 teens who discussed their CA experiences.
Major findings: The young people’s responses fell along a continuum between hatefulness and compassion. Some were acrimonious, and they vilified and wanted no contact with abusive individuals. Others forgave and strove to maintain bonds with those who harmed them. A couple of teens did not evaluate their abusers, focusing their time and attention on overcoming the effects of CA.
Conclusions: Young CA survivors’ interests ranged and were highly nuanced, defying singular and uniform interventions. The findings from this study reveal what justice might mean for adolescent CA survivors and have implications for traditional criminal justice and restorative justice interventions.

Author

• Katherine Irwin, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa