The TAT protocols of 30 sexually abused female children and 30 female children with no documented history of abuse were analyzed using the Scoring Scheme for the TAT and Other Verbal Projective Techniques (Fine, 1955). No significant differences were found between groups on mean number of negative feelings portraited in the TAT stories. Similarly, no significant differences were found between groups on mean number of unfavorable outcomes to TAT stories. However, when specific feelings were considered, subjects in the sexual abuse group showed a significantly higher incidence of reference to guilt and sexuality. These results were independent of age, race, and intelligence.

Parental alcoholism is a major risk factor for their children's future alcohol abuse and dependence during adulthood. Thus, the purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to understand African-American adult female children's perceptions of self-worth, their lived experiences, and their quality of life as it relates to parental alcoholism. The research focus and questions were addressed by applying the conceptual framework of Bowen's family systems and Covington's self-worth theories. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from 8 African-American adult female children of alcoholics. Subsequent data analysis and thematic coding were employed by using Colazzi's 7-step method to ensure rigor. The key findings from this study revealed that although over half of the women in this sample experienced some form of abuse and exposure to familial discord and even violence, their self-worth was strengthened by resilience and through forgiveness of their parents and siblings. This study's implications for positive social change include helping researchers and practitioners to better understand parental alcoholism and how it could shape the experiences of offspring, especially in the African-American female ethnic group. Future interventions could be shaped by these findings, and researchers may use these study results as a platform for future work in this literature domain.

Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth-century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy; in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy; and how selected authors create characters who as mothers fail to protect their children, particularly their daughters. This study explores whether the failure is a result of social-economic or physiological circumstances that make mothering and motherlove impossible or a rejection of the ideal mother seldom realized by contemporary women, or whether the novelists have rewritten the notion of the mother’s help books by their fragmented representations of motherhood. Has motherhood become a rejection of self-potential? The study will critique mother-daughter relationships in four late twentieth-century American novels in their complex presentations of motherhood and surrogacy: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1990), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1997). Appropriated terminology from other disciplines illustrates the prevalence of surrogacy and protection in the subject novels. The use of surrogate will refer to those who come forward to provide the role of mothering and protection.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T19:07:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Texto completo - LUCIA MAIA.pdf: 1013797 bytes, checksum: c1b0d73276b03fff0f96b310468ea161 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-03 / The present work investigates the social, economical, political, cultural and historical aspects that make children and adolescents vulnerable to sexual exploitation in the City of Iguassu, state of Paraná, Brazil. The large number of children and adolescents in situation of sexual exploitation worldwide, in Brazil and in Iguassu is sufficient to justify this study theme. The border's miseries , the sexual exploitation of female children and adolescents in Iguassu has the purpose to understand the qualitative details of sexual exploitation on female children and adolescents in Iguassu, Brazil, in 2012. We aim at finding the characteristics of this context, and understand, through studies, documents, descriptions and narratives, the sexual exploitation, and identify its characterictics and specificities. We have given priviledge to field research, by means of auscultation techniques, which consist in collecting free testimonials, allowing the subjects of the research to report their own lives. Throughout the auscultation we have found dramatic stories of the people who had their lives violated by social miseries, sexual abuse and exploitation. / O presente estudo investiga os fatores sociais, econômicos, políticos, culturais e históricos que tornam crianças e adolescentes vulneráveis à exploração sexual em Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, Brasil. A existência de elevado número de crianças e de adolescentes em situação de exploração sexual no mundo, no Brasil e em Foz do Iguaçu, é suficiente para justificar a pesquisa sobre a temática. Misérias das fronteiras, a exploração sexual de crianças e adolescentes femininas em Foz do Iguaçu tem como objetivo compreender as nuances qualitativas da exploração sexual de crianças e adolescentes femininas em Foz do Iguaçu-Paraná, Brasil em 2012. Busca-se caracterizar o contexto da exploração sexual de crianças e adolescentes femininas, entender por meio de estudos, documentos, descrições e narrativas a exploração sexual e identificar as características e especificidades do fenômeno da exploração sexual. Privilegiou-se, para a pesquisa de campo, a técnica das auscultas, que consiste em colher depoimentos livres, permitindo que as sujeitas e os sujeitos relatem suas vidas. A partir das auscultas verifica-se histórias dramáticas das sujeitas que tiveram suas vidas violadas pelas misérias sociais, pelo abuso e exploração sexuais.