Competing Discourses about Youth Sexual Exploitation in Canadian News Media.

Media holds the power to create, maintain, or break down stigmatizing attitudes, which affect policies, funding, and services. To understand how Canadian news media depicts the commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth, we examined 835 Canadian newspaper articles from 1989-2008 using a mixed methods critical discourse analysis approach, comparing representations to existing research about sexually exploited youth. Despite research evidence that equal rates of boys and girls experience exploitation, Canadian news media depicted exploited youth predominantly as heterosexual girls, and described them alternately as victims or workers in a trade, often both in the same story.

Narratives of dissociation: insights into the treatment of dissociation in individuals who were sexually abused as children.

This article provides an in-depth understanding of the treatment of dissociation from the perspective of 7 individuals who have a history of childhood sexual abuse and engage in moderate to high levels of dissociative behavior. Levels of dissociation were screened using the Dissociative Experiences Scale (E. Bernstein-Carlson & F.