| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 社會政策與社會工作學系 === 92 === Incest is a serious social problem, as well as a thorny family issue that is difficult to tackle with, for it tends to involve long-term and complex family relationships. Particularly alarming lies in the case of incest incident between a father and daughter, in which the mother, who is caught in an ambiguous family tie, is often trapped between her conflicting roles and her very own moral and ethical struggle, challenging her psychological, emotional and mental soundness. More so, in the process that an incest is uncovered, how the role of the mother is often ignored or declined does require field researchers to delve deeper into the situation that a mother is being subjected to, and to empathize the impact and pressure that a mother is placed under in the event of a family incest by offering necessary and adequate assistance in the intervention plan to provide more support to the mother and to improve the quality of clinical responses.
In light of which, the study interviewed four mothers confronting incest incidents by using a quantitative approach to understand the mothers’ subjective experience and response, the factors that affected the response, as well as the changing process and the difficulties they confronted. The findings were as summarized as the follows:
1. The expectation that the birth family and the conservative society towards the role of mother did influence the coping methods by which a mother confronts her daughter’s incest incident. The experience deriving from the four study subjects revealed the existing theories of incest incident each has its explanatory power but also limitation.
2. Upon learning her daughter’s incest incident, initially a mother may appear shocked and disbelief, with subjective emotion of anger, which tends to manifest later on in worries, trepidation, relenting, disappointed, depression, sadness, lacking self esteem, betrayal of whose family. Questioning and scolding the abuser of committing the incest act is of a common reaction among the respondents in the initial stage upon learning the incident.
3. While the desire to maintain a family together emerges as the hindrance that prevents a mother from active and positive reactions, the accumulation of negative emotions, lost of a confident and self-motivated willpower to change were the motives that aspire changes. As a result, mothers tend to heed more positive means, such as actively soliciting outside support and assistance, by expanding the circle of their lives, learning new family disciplinary method and modifying their own temperament, as well as telling others their general hardship and anguish, or they may take to more inactive means, such as burying in their work, reducing interaction with others, and severing the relationship with abuser and such.
4. A general lack of social support and financial difficulties are the common hardships experienced by the mothers, while they general wished that the litigation of an incest incident could be quickly wrapped up so that they could restart their lives.
Based on the above findings, the investigator made six recommendations to child protection workers for intervention strategies: to reflect own perspective and value towards the mothers; to avoid unequal power relation during the intervention; to incorporate mothers'' viewpoints and perspectives into the assessment and treatment; to assist those mothers in their social support network; to understand the difficulties and needs of the mothers.
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