There are a number of strengths to this piece of research that increase the reliability and validity of the results and conclusions drawn from them.
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Firstly, male sexual abuse in general is a very under represented research area in the literature. There has been some attempt to empirically test the victim to offender pathway, however these studies are generally low in number, tend to compare offender victims with offender non-victims to identify differences but then fail to follow up their findings to provide strong, practically applicable conclusions. This thesis presents a series of studies conducted on four groups of men (offender victims, offender non-victims, non-offender victims and non- offender non-victims) to identify differences between them to gain an insight as to why some men commit sexual offences following sexual abuse whereas others do not. Each study aimed to use information provided to develop findings and conclusions that would ultimately lead to some indication as to why the victim to offender pathway exists and how it can be halted. It is believed that the studies have gone some way to helping to explain this phenomenon and make a unique contribution to this developing field of research.
The studies used a variety of methods including self-report questionnaires, and empirical measures and qualitative and quantitative evaluation of narratives to assess factors related to sexual victimization and offending in the groups. The self-report questionnaires are all widely used in the literature and were found to be highly reliable in the samples used throughout this thesis. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count used to assess the qualitative data provided in Chapter 6 allowed a quantitative assessment of qualitative data. This has benefits over traditional qualitative methods as it is not reliant on subjective scoring by researchers which may result in bias. However, the use of quotations from participants to support the inferential statistics allowed the comments of the participants to be heard and not lost in a purely quantitative analysis. Finally the empirical measures used in Chapters 4 and 5 have been found previously to be a good indicator of sexual interest (Banse et al., 2010). The empirical tests provided a methodology that has not been used to assess the victim to offender pathway before. All three methodologies when considered together allowed for a thorough analysis of the data and conclusive inferences of what the data suggests to be made.
A further strength of the research is that the same participants were used in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6. A random subsection of the participants from
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Chapter 2 completed the tasks discussed in the other Chapters. This allowed for the data from the different methods to be reliably compared as it came from the same person, reducing the error variance associated with individual differences.
While there are a number of positives associated with this research there are some limitations that must be considered. Firstly, no standardized definition of sexual abuse was used across the studies in this thesis. Currently there is no standardized definition of childhood sexual abuse in the literature (this issue is discussed in detail in Chapter 1). It was not an aim of this thesis to provide a standardized definition, however one might have been helpful to screen participants to be included / excluded from the research. In spite of this
limitation, all of the victims in the studies, both offender and non-offender, had experienced contact sexual abuse by an adult at some point before the age of 16. This would likely fit any standardized definition of sexual abuse. Furthermore, participants’ scores were screened for outliers and normality prior to data analysis meaning any scores significantly deviating from the mean would have been removed (no data points were, in reality, found to be outliers in any study conducted). Finally, participants’ data were compared with their own scores in Chapter 5 limiting the effect that any discrepancies.
The group sizes were relatively small; while 20 participants in each group is considered to be reasonable to perform inferential statistics on (Field, 2009), it results in a loss of statistical power, particularly when comparing across multiple groups. However, the loss of power was controlled for by using conservative p values and more robust statistical methods.
While running the study with a limited amount of participants is not ideal, there were some considerable difficulties faced by the research in recruiting participants this research. This series of studies were conducted over a four year period. A significant amount of this time was dedicated to advertizing and attempting to recruit participants. Finding non-offender victims was particularly problematic. Despite being supported by, and my research promoted by, a number of male survivor charities throughout the UK, very few people came forward to participate. There is evidence that male survivors do not disclose their abuse until much later in life compared with women survivors (O’Leary and
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Barber, 2008) and this may have contributed to the challenge of recruiting for male survivors in undergraduate populations.
This gender difference in disclosure was evidenced by the fact that the studies received a lot of interest from women survivors who said that they would be happy to participate, but as the majority of child sex offenders are men it was thought that data provided by male offender victims and female non-offender victims would not be comparable. Most of the people who were willing to participate were the founders or high up managers in the charities and while their support was appreciated, it was felt that they would not be truly representative of male victims more generally.
In an attempt to recruit participants the format of the studies was changed. All studies were available to be completed online and the qualitative data
collected in Chapter 6 was changed from an interview study to a questionnaire study where participants were asked to write / type their answers in as much detail as possible. The anonymity of the online studies seemed to be effective and male non-offender victims started to volunteer for the studies. In spite of the change in format only 20 participants could be recruited across the 3 year period that participant recruitment took place. The difficulties faced in recruitment of male non-offender victims is likely to reflect difficulties faced by other
researchers in the field, and may therefore be the reason why the literature on the victim to offender pathway, and in male survivors more generally, is so limited. It also provides an indication of the lack of support services and the
stigmatization that still surrounds male sexual abuse (Alaggia, 2005; Kia-Keating et al., 2005), that men, for whatever reason do not discuss their abuse when women are evidently much more forthcoming.