Young people who have experienced repeated abuse from an early age are affected cognitively and physically in a multitude of domains. This thesis reports on previous work that indicates that chronic trauma may cause significant difficulties in self-regulation which can lead to subsequent traumatisation, revictimisation, substance abuse, suicide, antisocial behaviour and conduct disorder. Treatment of trauma initially focuses on skill building rather than on reprocessing. Movement has been used to aid with areas such as stress reduction but there is scope to broaden the benefits of physical activity in this population. We report on the design, implementation and testing of a custom movement-based intervention for improving self-regulation in young people. As part of the design process the thesis identified that movement-based gaming may be used to provide a novel useful tool. In order to effectively design movement-based games, available commercial games were evaluated to obtain a guiding set of design principles. Following analysis of movement capture technology, the Wii Balance Board was chosen as a portable, inexpensive accurate system for detecting movement during game-play. Taking the requirements from a clinical, movement-based, virtual reality and gaming perspective, prototype games were developed. From these, two games were implemented. These games were tested with an initial pilot, comparison group and finally a clinical sample of young people based in secure care facilities. We found that our work disagreed with previous research which indicated general executive functioning deficits in traumatised youths. However, there was evidence that self-regulation was impaired. Analysis of several case-studies indicated potential beneficial effects of the intervention. The work demonstrated that movement-based gaming may be used in a clinical setting but that further work is required to understand how movement may be used to build self-regulatory strength and the best means of delivering gaming-based interventions to young people with complex trauma.

Safeguarding is one way the United Kingdom Government fulfils its commitment to keep children safe in the spirit of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Safeguarding includes a wide range of preventive activities including child protection (Devaney & Spratt, 2008). With primary care health professionals having issues identifying and reporting child protection concerns to social services, plus a paucity of safeguarding research studies (Cowley.et aI, 2013), and the relationship between safeguarding and child protection never being defined (Hall & Williams, 2008), this thesis explores understanding of the term 'safeguarding children' and the safeguarding role of two professions considered vital to safeguarding children: General Practitioners and Health Visitors (HM Government, 2013). With public health approaches increasingly advocated to address child maltreatment (for example, CDC, 2006) the thesis discusses the implications of findings for safeguarding children, policy and practice within a public health approach in Northern Ireland. With a pragmatic worldview the study used a sequential exploratory design. Phase one of the study used the focus group method; phase two used the mixed mode survey method. Overall results illustrate different professional understandings of safeguarding and difficulties identifying a range of safeguarding concerns. While results indicate some support for the promise of a public health approach many requirements remain outstanding if children are to be safeguarded and protected in the way aspired to by Northern Ireland's current safeguarding policy.

Although online child sexual abuse is an issue of international concern, little is known about the news media’s role in its construction. In this study I draw upon a corpus of 6,077 newspaper articles from Australia, Canada, the UK and USA – four member countries of the Virtual Global Taskforce set up in 2003 to combat online child abuse. Through a quantitative content analysis, I trace the trajectory of news coverage in each country and identify the news hooks and key events through which the issue has been framed during peak periods. This is complemented by a critical discourse analysis, through which I interrogate discourses around spatiality, particularly those pertaining to the paedophile’s migration from the ‘real world’ to ‘cyberspace’, and from the ‘outside’ into the heart of ‘the home’. The quantitative element of my study shows that: (1) although coverage began to emerge during the mid-1990s, it only began to accelerate after the turn of the century; (2) online abuse has been defined through episodic coverage, often around high-profile ‘grooming’ cases; (3) coverage in each country has largely followed a unique, nationally-specific narrative (shaped by its own socio-political context); and (4) although coverage has gone through periods of peaks and troughs, there are few signs that online abuse is slipping off the news agenda. In my qualitative analysis, I present evidence that: (1) claims-makers have drawn upon existing understandings of, and fears about, parks and playgrounds to construct aspects of the internet as online ‘paedophile places’; (2) a discourse of temporal proximity has been adopted to depict children as being ‘seconds’ or ‘clicks’ away from an internet predator; (3) this discourse of temporal proximity has been used to localise a global problem and depict the internet predator as being even closer to children than the traditional figure of ‘the paedophile’; and (4) the internet has been framed as bringing fundamental changes to how sexual threats to children should be understood. Through this analysis I argue that these discourses have been used to legitimise tighter regulation of children’s lives and, although specific to the internet, they perpetuate myths about paedophiles, childhood, the family and home that limit thinking about child sexual abuse on a much broader scale.

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Child abuse is a worldwide phenomenon, known to have a psychological and social impact on communities and individuals. This thesis reports a study conducted to assess abused children in Saudi Arabia for behavioural and emotional disorders, as there is a lack of psychological research into this problem in this context. A mixed method approach was used for the research. In the quantitative section of the study, children and their care givers were asked to complete the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, Child Behavior Checklist and the Family Environment Scale. For the qualitative component, the abused children and their parents or guardians were interviewed to discover the problems they experienced associated with the abuse. A thematic analysis was then undertaken based on the notes taken during the interviews. The study sample participants were interviewed in Riyadh, and comprised two groups; 67 abused children and 19 caregivers (parents or guardians), and the second 57 non-abused children and 39 parents. The results from the quantitative data obtained from the abused children and their care givers were compared with the results of the quantitative data obtained from non-abused children and their caregivers. Both sets of data were compared with published norms for the tests. Examining the quantitative data, behavioural and emotional disorders were found to be common among the abused children. However, the differences between abused and non-abused children were not statistically significant on Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, except for younger girls. The differences in total scores for the Child Behavior Checklist between abused and non-abused children were statistically significant for all children, except younger boys. The majority of the families of the abused children were conflict-oriented families. Because the measures used were developed with Western populations, it possible that some of the effects found reflect cultural differences in child rearing practices and expectations of parents about child behaviour. However, there was also evidence of the devastating effects of child abuse and this was confirmed by the findings in the qualitative section of the study. In the interviews, the children showed emotional and behavioural problems including fear, tension, anxiety, and depression. In addition, they reported experiencing some behavioural and physical problems, such as shaking, rapid heartbeat and sweating. The most common themes that emerged in relation to the children were fear, thoughts of death, being forced to do things, lack of trust, low self-esteem, alcohol and drugs, and psychological problems. Further analyses, which categorised abused children according to whether they had suffered physical abuse or not, or according to whether they had suffered sexual abuse or not, failed to show any clear effect of type of abuse on ensuing psychological problems. Rather, this group of abused Saudi children seemed to have a common set of problems. The results of both quantitative and qualitative methods in this study clearly illustrated that abused children are subject to high levels of behavioural and emotional disorders. The results of the study justify further research on this population, and should be used to improve psychological services for abused children in Saudi Arabia.

Childhood maltreatment represents a global phenomenon and a major public health concern. Despite considerable advances in the field, a number of important gaps have yet to be fully addressed. The current thesis set out to empirically address four outstanding research questions using data drawn from a community sample of high-risk youth. First, we examined whether childhood maltreatment and community violence exposure exert independent, additive or interactive effects on mental health (Chapter 2). Findings point to the existence of both common and distinct effects. While maltreatment predicted symptoms across a broad range of mental health domains, the impact of community violence was more constrained. Typically, these forms of adversity additively affected mental health. Second, we explored whether distinct forms of maltreatment uniquely impact mental health functioning (Chapter 3). Maltreatment types were highly interrelated and frequently co-occurring. We identified both shared and unique effects of maltreatment types on mental health. Emotional abuse emerged as the sole unique contributor to internalizing difficulties and trauma symptoms. Third, we investigated whether variants of callous-unemotional traits in youth are differentially associated with maltreatment history and markers of individual functioning (Chapter 4). Maltreatment was a key discriminating factor between variants. The combination of high anxiety and high callous-unemotional traits indexed a particularly vulnerable group of youth characterized by increased psychopathology and suicide risk. Finally, we tested the psychometric properties of the first non-verbal screening tool of family aggression (Chapter 5). We found initial support for the reliability, validity and diagnostic accuracy of this measure in detecting multiple forms of family aggression, including direct victimization and exposure to intimate partner violence. Overall, findings from the current thesis significantly advance knowledge of the processes by which interrelated forms of developmental adversity combine to affect mental health, as well as elucidating factors associated with individual heterogeneity to maltreatment responses.

This paper is the contexualising statement as part of my submission for a PhD by published works. It seeks to explore the development of a black feminist approach to child sexual abuse discourses in my work. The central focus of the paper is an examination of the core concerns covered in my writings, notably the interconnections between race, gender and class in shaping dynamics of child sexual abuse in black families. Using a content analysis approach to re-read my writings, this paper reflects on the main themes emerging in the body of work submitted, to chart my journey as a feminist researcher and the development of the ideas in my work. In particular, it presents a reflexive examination of my writings and opens up questions about gender and race for understanding the basis of power in the research process. Drawing on a range of feminist and anti-racist thinkers, it provides a synthesis of the theoretical, methodological and epistemological bases of my writings and critically considers how the body of work comes together as a coherent whole. This paper evaluates the strengths and limitations of the research and explores the implications for the inferences that can be drawn from the analyses I have constructed. The claim is made that as the body of work discussed is original, expands feminist scholarship on child abuse, and makes an important contribution to the knowledge base of child abuse, it is thus equivalent to a PhD by conventional thesis route.

This thesis explores the way in which memorable life events prompted change across the life course following experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Seven women and five men were recruited purposively within the United Kingdom. In-depth interviews were carried out which focussed on key life course concepts including time and place, linked lives and life events. Life History Calendars were jointly-produced simultaneous to the interviews, which allowed the collection of a broad and complex range of contextual and event-based data. The analysis hinged on the concept of 'emergent change', defined as fragile and tentative change set within dynamic and complex interpersonal and social environments. Emergent change came primarily in the form of contextualisation, recognition and disclosure (in childhood), seeking emotional support (in adolescence) and resolution and acceptance (in adulthood). Varied and unique memorable life events were identified as important catalysts for different kinds of emergent change, highlighting the importance of the meaning that people attach to them. However, the relationship between these events and change was highly continent upon context. A conceptual tool is offered as a way of navigating this relationship and other events, relationships and contexts which act as mediating, moderating, mitigating and reinforcing influences on emergent change The research - the first known study in the field of sexual abuse to examine the connection between memorable events and life change in-depth - therefore, makes an original contribution to the field of resilience and recovery following sexual abuse. Memorable events may provide another avenue to identify children experiencing abuse and, as contextualised within the tool, may have some use in therapeutic contexts for supporting recovery. The tool may also provide a basis for further qualitative and quantitative research in understanding the role of events in recovery.

The aim of this project is to consider Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary power and his idea of knowledge-power in a specific site of power relations. The site selected, the field of child protection, affords a study of various forms of power operating at different levels and within different institutionalised contexts, against a contemporary background of cultural change and discontinuities. The discourses and discursive practices of privileged agents in the human sciences, and the privileging effects of institutionalised rules,are analysed and discussed. It is argued that the market-driven discourse of resource management is privileged over the discourses of the human sciences; that the privileged knowledge/truths of the human sciences are increasingly being challenged and opposed, through the ubiquitous discourses of the media, by organized alliances of subjects, and by a population generally less compliant than in previous generations; and that the exercise of disciplinary power by expert agents is being increasingly regulated by the State through the privileged rules of the law. The conclusion reached is that privilege and resources are significant factors in power relations and that specialised knowledge is only one of a range of privileging resources that are always in play in a complex field of force relations. The methodology used draws on research into theories of power, on analyses of power relations and discursive practices, and case studies. It incorporates theory with an experiential perspective derived from 18 years employment in local authority social work and management. The discourses and discursive practices of social work intersect with theoretical discourses; and first-person narratives from the author's work experience are used as illustrations. In chapter 1, Foucault's theories of discourse, disciplinary power and knowledge-power are introduced and critically reviewed. Theories of organizational power and the notion of agency are considered in chapter 2. Chapter 3 reviews Foucault's idea of bio-power, the historical intervention of the State and its agents in the family, and the changing concept of childhood. Changes in the family, and professional, legal and managerial discourses intersecting in the field of child protection, are discussed in chapter 4. A case study is used in chapter 5 to illustrate and analyse power operating in the field of child protection in 1987, prior to the Children Act 1989. The privileging effects of specialised knowledge and other factors affecting power relations are identified. In chapter 6, sections of the text of the Children Act 1989 are analysed to identify the ways in which the discourse of the law now seeks to address the power imbalances between parents, children and the professional agents. The ambiguities of its language and the way it privileges the agents with the right to exercise discretion in their practices are discussed. The power of the agents, the politics of child protection, and media power are considered in chapter 7. The discourses of social work and its historical development as part of the state apparatus of discipline and control are discussed in chapter 8. A case study is used to illustrate power relations among social workers and other professional agents in the field of child protection, and to identify key privileging factors in the operation of power, among them the organizational mechanisms and statutory instruments that empower the agents. Chapter 9 summarises the main points in the preceding chapters and discusses the ways in which privileged knowledge-power is regulated and increasingly resisted in contemporary society.