Abstract
Based on 40 in-depth qualitative interviews with professionals, including law-enforcement personnel, educators, and mental health and health-care professionals, this chapter presents a study that describes and analyzes an insider’s view of the ways in which child abuse professionals perceive and understand the disclosure of violence. We found that disclosure is a function of social processes related to the values, ideologies, ways of thinking, and interests of the various social agents involved in the process. Thus, disclosure is not an objective fact-finding process and the subsequent assignment of visibility and proper societal reaction, but rather a social construction.
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Notes
- 1.
The quantitative component included a national survey to determine the incidence and prevalence of child abuse and the reasons for disclosure or lack thereof. Correlates of child abuse and types of abuse were also explored. The qualitative component consisted of in-depth interviews with 130 male and female children and youths aged 12–17, victims of neglect and abuse, across various cultural groups living in Israel, including Jews and Arabs. Eighty interviews were conducted with professionals to enable the multifaceted exploration of abuse from the perspective of various participants in the process. The information will be presented to practitioners and researchers in the form of a national database, which can be used for the development of intervention models.
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Eisikovits, Z., Davidov, J., Sigad, L., Lev-Wiesel, R. (2015). The Social Construction of Disclosure: The Case of Child Abuse in Israeli Society. In: Mathews, B., Bross, D. (eds) Mandatory Reporting Laws and the Identification of Severe Child Abuse and Neglect. Child Maltreatment, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9685-9_19
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