Helpless in the System

The convicted rapist will go free. Not because anyone doubts that he committed the crime-but because his attorneys successfully argued that he was tried under the wrong law. His lawyers, doing their job well, have managed to persuade the Florida judicial system that the year-old girl with muscular dystrophy-the girl who could only get around with the help of a wheelchair, the girl who could not move her legs-was not ''physically helpless.

She was not ''physically unable to communicate her unwillingness'' to be raped. There was no argument that Davis did not rape the wheelchair-bound girl; the argument was that she was not ''physically helpless,'' and that argument was agreed to by the appeals court. The girl was judged not ''physically helpless. Will he be tried again-will he be tried for ''standard'' rape, instead of rape against a physically helpless victim?

The Constitution contains a provision against double jeopardy-a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. After the Florida Supreme Court decision was handed down, assistant attorney general Charles Corces-who argued for the state that the conviction should stand-said:. The decision leaves us with the conviction overturned.

There can be no more appeals. The entire argument hinged on the assertion that he was tried under the wrong law-that the victim was not. But the court decided the other way.

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Maternal states of mind on the AAI and subtypes of disorganized infant attachment strategies. Previous reports from this study have also documented that, compared to the disorganized—secure group, mothers of disorganized—insecure infants were more hostile and role reversing in interaction with their infants, had experienced higher rates of parental psychopathology as children, and had higher rates of psychosocial problems in adulthood Lyons—Ruth et al. These multiple converging sources of data indicate that failing to identify atypical states of mind among mothers in this subgroup could result in misleading assessments of clinical samples.

Hypothesis 3 was that any relations between maternal states of mind and infant disorganization would be mediated by deviations in parent—infant interactions. Consistent with previous reports from the larger infancy sample Lyons—Ruth et al.

SYSTEM OF JUSTICE IS HELPLESS, TOO

Maternal states of mind on the AAI and profiles of maternal disrupted affective communication. However, only three mothers were classified U in relation to abuse, indicating the need for replication of this finding. The finding does point to the potential importance of differentiating the sequellae of loss from the sequelae of abuse, as well as of developing broader criteria to capture states of mind associated with the aftermath of hostile, emotionally unprotective, or frankly abusive relationships.

Therefore, a final regression analysis testing the mediational model was conducted. The CC category is currently applied to transcripts in which the discourse characteristics change over the course of the interview dismissing to preoccupied or change from parent to parent or in which coherence is low but no particular state of mind scale is elevated. Although we had expected otherwise, the results indicate that these CC indicators were independent of the HH indicators. There appear to be many ways to manifest contradictory strategies on the AAI, not all of which are included in the U or CC coding criteria.

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The HH system both codes new elements that do not overlap with the traditional system, and combines those new elements with elements of the existing rare classifications Ds2, E3 into more elaborated profiles associated with the intergenerational transmission of disorganization. As is evident, however, this work exists within the Main and Goldwyn theoretical framework regarding integrated and unintegrated states of mind and expands the existing Main and Goldwyn system to include additional ways that incoherence manifests itself in more disturbed samples.

Consistent with standard AAI coding, it is not the content of the participant's experiences that is used to classify the participant's state of mind. Instead, it is the way the participant organizes his or her discourse about these experiences, that is, how the participant tells the story. It is important to note that a number of the simple frequency codes were also significantly related to infant disorganization. Given the limited and specific nature of the frequency codes, their generally robust associations with infant disorganization were somewhat surprising. It is also important to note that because of the importance of assessing lack of resolution of abuse in this sample, the standard AAI protocol was augmented with a set of questions developed by trauma researchers to ask about the occurrence of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and witnessed violence Herman et al.

In support of the applicability of the HH coding system to standard AAI protocols without additional probes for abuse experiences , the coding system has also been applied to the standard AAI interviews of borderline and dysthymic patients reported on by Patrick et al. Those protocols did not include additional questions about abuse and the HH system significantly differentiated between dysthymic and borderline patients, with no problem applying the system. Recent evidence indicates that the primary gain from the additional questions is likely to lie in increased reporting of sexual abuse experiences.

Bailey, Moran, and Forbes reported that physical abuse experiences were reported at about the same rate on the standard format of the AAI as on a structured traumatic experiences questionnaire; however, sexual abuse experiences were underreported on the AAI compared to the traumatic experiences questionnaire.

Therefore, the additional questions are likely to result in increased identification of sexual abuse experiences compared to the standard AAI format. The validity of the AAI in relation to the prediction of infant disorganization depends on accurate identification of abuse experiences so that lack of resolution of such experiences can be assessed. Therefore, the additional probes should have maximized the potential for experiences of abuse to be identified during the interview and coded for U status.

Greater difficulty resolving loss than abuse experiences is unexpected and difficult to justify given existing theory and research on sequellae of abuse. In addition, most losses had not occurred prior to age 16, and did not involve nuclear family members, while abuse experiences were all prior to adulthood. There is almost no published data for comparison from other studies on the relative rates of subjects with abuse histories who are classified U for abuse compared to rates of subjects with loss histories who are classified U for loss.

Such a breakdown would be valuable in future reports. To date, however, there is no reason to consider these data atypical. Because the criteria for U states of mind were originally developed for loss experiences and only subsequently extended to abuse experiences, current criteria for lack of resolution may be more sensitive to processes involved in integrating loss and less sensitive to processes involved in integrating abuse. It seems unlikely that including the few additional questions about the occurrence of abuse experiences altered the process of the AAI for the participant.

First, for the large group who have not experienced abuse, the questions do not apply. Second, recent data indicate that the group who has experienced physical abuse is already reporting those experiences on the standard AAI interview at the same rates as any structured questionnaires, as noted above.

Therefore, the AAI process for this group is also unlikely to be different. Only for the small group who have experienced sexual abuse would we expect the AAI process to be different, in that those experiences are often not elicited in the usual AAI format Bailey et al. However, the opportunity to hear how such experiences are discussed in the interview should result in a gain rather than a loss of coding validity for the AAI and, particularly, for the coding of lack of resolution of abuse. Given that the AAI data were gathered 5.

These predictive associations over time from infant attachment to maternal state of mind were also evident in the original Berkeley study data where AAIs were gathered when the children were age 6 Main et al. Severity of trauma was not directly associated with infant disorganization, however.

An important impetus for developing the current coding system was the view that parental emotional unavailability, whether due to chronic hostility, role reversal, or withdrawal from the child, responses that do not meet current criteria for abuse, constitutes a primary relational trauma. The serious relational deviations inherent in parental hostility, role reversal, and withdrawal can now be coded reliably from early infancy onward, and are robust predictors of infant disorganization, as noted earlier e.

According to this conceptualization, such primary early relational trauma would be expected to impact overall symptom severity by adulthood through at least three mechanisms. First, serious early relational deviations create early impairments in the sense of safety and protection of the infant and young child, with concomitant impact on neurobiological stress responses and psychological symptom formation. Second, these parental stances are also likely to be correlated with the child's exposure to physically threatening events over time.

Third, unresponsive parental stances are likely to contribute to more pronounced symptom formation around particular traumatic events, due to the lack of parental comfort and help in integrating the traumatic experience. Given the relation between U states of mind and infant disorganization repeatedly found in low-risk samples van IJzendoorn et al. They were also not often coded as preoccupied because the negative evaluations were usually not presented in the context of angry, entangled speech patterns but as closed judgments in the context of a concise or even constricted discourse structure.

It appears that the difficulties in early relationships were too encompassing to be dealt with by lack of memory or by consistent idealization and caregivers were often too frightening or vulnerable to risk any anger, so the difficulties are presented as matter of fact or even as having a certain entertainment or shock value. Instead, fearful statements were made about a variety of different topics throughout the interview. The discourse of Helpless protocols was also likely to convey an attitude of lack of autonomy of thought, although not necessarily through childlike or passive speech forms, in combination with active role reversal in regard to a caregiver.

Some participants classified in the Helpless category described caregivers who were frightened or victimized and at the same time showed identification with the victimized caregiver. Theoretically, we view a helpless adult state of mind as a potential outgrowth of a caregiving stance in childhood, organized around the largely impossible goal of helping an impaired parent to function more effectively. At the most basic level, we would view the child's sense of helplessness as grounded in a primary failure to receive effective care around attachment needs in infancy.

This sense of helplessness would be further elaborated in childhood as a function of the inability to ease the parent's vulnerability, as well as by the identification with and modeling of the parent's anxiety and dysfunction. Although these hostile or helpless profiles anchor the two extremes of the distribution captured by this coding system, it should be reiterated that these hostile or helpless states of mind often occur in mixed rather than pure form. Consistent with the view that hostile and helpless working models represent complementary roles in an unbalanced dyadic relational structure Lyons—Ruth et al.

Given the initial promise of these results, additional work is needed exploring the concurrent correlates and predictive validity of these codes in a wider range of clinical samples with concurrent infant attachment data. Assessing the factors associated with infant disorganization among clinical populations now constitutes a critical agenda if adequate early prevention programs are to be designed for the parents and infants at greatest risk.

The standard questions continue with Question National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author manuscript; available in PMC Apr Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Adress correspondence and reprint requests to: See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Classification as U With Respect to Loss or Trauma According to the etiological model of the genesis of disorganized attachment strategies in infancy initially proposed by Main and Hesse , parental experiences of loss or abuse may lead to unintegrated states of mind that generate lapses in reasoning or discourse when interviewed on the AAI.

Measures Demographic risk A cumulative demographic risk variable was computed by summing the presence of the following five factors: The coding system also includes a set of the following six individual frequency codes that serve to tie the qualitative rating and classification to clearly specifiable features of the transcript: Open in a separate window. Table 2 Magnitude of association between maternal states of mind on the AAI and extent of infant disorganized attachment behavior. Table 3 Contribution of maternal state of mind on the AAI to infant disorganization. When you were angry, what would happen?

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Nongenomic transmission across generations of maternal behavior and stress responses in the rat.

Alexander Vancel (Author of Helpless in the System)

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