From Witness to Advocate: A Community Empowerment Course Derived from a Multi-Cultural Grounded Theory of Therapeutic Interventions in Observable Child Maltreatment
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Authors
Wilde, Susan Marie
Issue Date
2002
Type
Dissertation
Language
en
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to produce a multi-cultural grounded theory of publicly observable child maltreatment and the interventions attempted by witnessing lay persons and to design a prototype course to teach intervention skills to interested citizens. Participants were recruited from professional organizations and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as from the Internet. Nine majority-culture North American participants aged 30 to 62 responded and provided interviews covering 15 incidents of child maltreatment in which they had attempted to intervene. The cultural identities of the families in the reported incidents included European American, African American, and multi-ethnic cultural groups; the parents were in their 20s or 30s and the children ranged in age from 2 to 14 years of age. Results indicated that families who physically and emotionally abuse in public settings fall into the mid-range of severity for abuse. In all cases, the wide variety of strategies utilized by intervening witnesses served to immediately stop the abusing adult from hitting or psychologically abusing the child. A scale for rating observable child maltreatment incidents was developed from the data. Interventions attempted by witnesses ranged from coercive (physical force, giving orders, summoning authorities, removing the child from danger) to tactical (enlisting the aid of helpers and bystanders, distracting, stalling) to collaborative (providing reframes or instructions for more nurturing or more effective parenting, empathic joining with family members). The observed family reactions to the intervention were either defensive, escalating, or positive. An analysis examining the relationship between incident severity, intervention strategy, and family reaction suggests that family members are more likely to be defensive about more severe physical injury and higher levels of emotional upset regardless of intervention style. Moreover, the severity of the incident is directly proportional to the reaction defensiveness. To aid in training witness advocates, a road map of strategies useful along the spectrum of maltreatment severity was developed and included in a prototype training manual. Further research is suggested to refine the maltreatment incident severity rating scale and to explore witness interventions in a wider range of cultural settings.