Daily Archives: June 18, 2012

18 Jun

The Vulnerability Of Sexual Minority Women

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Article Date: 17 Jun 2012 – 0:00 PDT
 
Adult lesbian and bisexual women are more likely to report childhood abuse and adult sexual assault than heterosexual women, according to a new study by Dr. Keren Lehavot from the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, USA and her collaborators. Furthermore, the researchers’ work shows that women who are more butch report more abuse in childhood, particularly physical and emotional neglect, while women who identify as femme, and have a more feminine appearance, report more adult sexual assaults. The work is published online in Springer’s journal, Sex Roles.
 
It is yet not fully understood why sexual minority women are at greater risk of being abused both as children and adults compared to heterosexual women. Using data from the Rainbow Women’s Project in the US – a national, web-based survey of adult women who identify as lesbian/gay and bisexual – the researchers examined whether reported experiences of childhood abuse and adult sexual assault differed among sexual minority women of varying gender identity* (butch, femme, androgynous, or other) and gender expression** (more butch/masculine vs. more femme/feminine).
18 Jun

Helping People in Crisis

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The messages that people in crisis send themselves become very negative and twisted, in contrast to the reality of the situation. Dilemmas that are constant and grinding wear people out, pushing their internal state of perception more and more toward negative self-talk until their cognitive sets are so negative that no amount of preaching can convince them anything positive will ever come from the situation. Their behavior soon follows this negative self-talk and begets a self-fulfilling prophecy that the situation is hopeless. At this juncture, crisis intervention becomes a job of rewiring the individual’s thoughts to more positive feedback loops by practicing and rehearsing new self-statements about the situation until the old, negative, debilitating ones are expunged. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) seems most appropriate after the client has been stabilized and returned to an approximate state of precrisis equilibrium. Basic components of this approach are found in the rational-emotive work of Ellis (1982), the cognitive-behavioral approach of Meichenbaum (1977), and the cognitive system of Beck (1976) (James 14-15).