Sharon Lamb

University of Massachusetts Boston | UMB · Department of Counseling and School Psychology

Humane Acts Bystander Intervention Training curriculum (HABIT) aims to reach students less inclined to learn from liberal and more-feminist education offered in current curricula. Using moral foundations theory to encourage bystander intervention in potential sexual assault situations, the authors taught and assessed 137 diverse students within an...

Our 2021 article in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice argued that mutuality, defined as ‘loving attention’ towards a sexual partner, should be a moral standard for ethical sex. We specified that this loving attention should occur in the form of attempting to know what could be knowable about the other person and taking a ‘thick’ view of the other i...

Despite the initial understanding of the word ‘triggered’ as relating to the clinical phenomenon of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this language has become a common part of the vernacular today, used by many people to apply to a wide variety of experiences and events. Counselling students are particularly sensitised to trauma, as well as id...

Sexual assault on college campuses has become a major concern. A common response has been to provide bystander intervention training, which research shows may provide short-term attitude change without reducing the number of assaults. Current curricula and research may neglect the very factors that could play a part in students’ desire and ability...

Sex education in the United States is often approached through an individual lens that focuses on personal protection, safety, and rights. This focus on personal responsibility and care-for-self reflects national values and permeates governmental systems and actions, including generalized public health approaches. This issue has been most recently...

The increasing prevalence of campus sexual assault begs the question of whether consent campaigns, and interventions that preceded them, may be effectively paying lip service to this issue rather that creating meaningful reform. In this paper, we focus on poster campaigns that promote consent as a solution to campus sexual assault. We begin by revi...

In this paper we challenge the idea that valid consent is the golden standard by which a sexual encounter is deemed ethical. We begin by reviewing the recent public focus on consent as an ethical standard, and then argue for a standard that goes beyond legalistic and contractual foci. This is the standard of mutuality which extends beyond the assur...

Memorializes Rachel T. Hare-Musitn (1928-2020). She was a distinguished scholar, a pioneering feminist family therapist, and a dedicated leader in the American Psychological Association (APA). Her intellectual legacy includes two books and nearly 120 articles and chapters on professional ethics, gender theory in psychological research, gender relat...

This qualitative study explores the sexting experiences of college-aged students with attention to gendered understandings and motivations of sexting. We gathered data on the decision-making process, relational contexts in which sexting occurred, body-image management, and perceived outcomes of past experiences. Participants in this study were aske...

The Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, published in 2007, is one of the most frequently accessed APA reports. The task force was formed and report was compiled in response to concerns regarding the impact of sexualization on girls and society at large. This article presents a review of research published since the report wa...

The development of healthy female sexuality is a complex and multidimensional process. In understanding female adolescent sexual development, we must understand both the suppression and the celebration of female desire in its historical and structural contexts. Feminist theorists have long studied the suppression of desire and connected that desire...

In this paper we explore through discourse analysis the written personal narratives (vignettes) of “sketchy” sexual situations that students found themselves in as bystanders. We asked for these vignettes in a larger study examining the relationships between moral judgment/reasoning and intervening or not in situations of potential sexual assault....

The chapter begins by examining the concept of childhood innocence, the critiques of the concept, and critiques about the political use of the concept. We go on to ask what about childhood innocence or similar concepts might be preserved in the area of sex education and childhood sexuality in general. We agree that using the concept of innocence to...

This article explored the role of a lifetime history of gender-based violence, ambivalent sexism, and gynecological health worries in the development of reproductive and sexual symptoms among women in Kyrgyzstan. Non-pregnant women who were patients of gynecological clinics (N = 143) participated in the study. A positive relationship between the ex...

Journalists, child advocacy organizations, parents and psychologists have argued that the sexualization of girls is a broad and increasing problem and is harmful to girls.The APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls was formed in response to these expressions of public concern.

This mixed-methods research explored the moral motivations of undergraduates who identified as bystanders in a situation of potential sexual assault. In the quantitative analysis, we examined the difference between interveners and noninterveners with regard to their scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire–30 Item (MFQ-30), which considers fiv...

This chapter provides the theoretical foundations upon which child and adolescent sexuality are built, and considers the range of normative to more problematic childhood sexual behavior in more depth. Compared with understanding childhood sexuality, understanding normative sexual behavior for adolescents is more ambiguous and variable depending on...

Very little research has examined what goes on in the minds of young men during sex. Such an exploration might reveal gender-normative discourses as well as challenges to such. This discourse analysis understands internal speech as that which both instantiates status quo ideals of masculinity and which challenges them. We use theories of hegemonic...

This book takes a close look at how girls of color think, talk, and learn about sex and sexual ethics, how they navigate their developing sexuality through cultural stereotypes about sex and body image, and how they negotiate their sexual learning within a co-ed sex education classroom. While girls of color are often pictured as at risk or engaged...

The central focus of this chapter explores how girls in a coed classroom deal with the vulnerability that may arise in lessons in curricula that position them as at risk for coercion and rape. Needing to assert themselves as both strong and equals to the boys in the class, they introduce ideas of retaliation and aggression. In this chapter we also...

This article presents early evaluation data on the effectiveness of an ethics-based sex education program, the Sexual Ethics for a Caring Society Curriculum (SECS-C), which strives to develop adolescents’ thinking about sex so that they might act ethically in relation to other people and reflect ethically upon sexual messages and events in the worl...

The idea of empowering others to benefit them as well as the greater social good flourished in the field of social work and the discipline of community psychology. The path to empowerment for those who have been oppressed is said to contain elements of consciousness-raising, education, and solidarity toward social action. Empowerment is a key conce...

This research explores the question of how a sex education curriculum can be a form of civics education, moving students from a discourse of personal responsibility to a discourse that represents a “we” voice and takes into consideration not only the other person but society.In two 8-week classes delivered in a charter school to a racially and ethn...

We finish the book with recommendation about how those in agencies that provide counseling or education, teachers, sex educators, and communities might respond to girls of color and their need for sex education and positive messaging about sexuality. Our recommendations address media sexualization and objectification; how sex education classes can...

The chapter on body image begins with a review of the literature on the White “thin body ideal” and the work that shows that Black and Latina girls have been shown to have different beauty standards. These latter ideals have been described as more permissive in terms of body size and shape. We explore the various reasons this might be true and desc...

In this introductory chapter, we discuss who are girls of color and how have girls of color and their sexuality been framed in various related fields. We also situate our work in current contexts, briefly reviewing the context of hypersexualization of girls. We introduce the chapters to come and we discuss our positions in terms of our own racial i...

The idea of respect has a long history in the Black community and has come to mean many things. We begin by looking at the history of the Black church and Christian women’s entreaties to other women in the Black community to conduct themselves with respect. This was an effort to counteract stereotypes of Black female promiscuity. A highly contested...

We use this chapter to discuss the literature on media influences and the sexualization of girlhood. With a focus on the literature addressing girls of color we also review some of the debate about the genre of hip-hop. We provide a literature review on the effects of media and critique this literature using Rosalind Gill’s analysis. Within this ch...

Building on qualitative research about sexualisation by media and culture and the impact on girls' development, in this article we present a discourse analysis of three focus groups of teen girls of colour and of diverse ethnicities asked to talk about sexiness. We focus on the ways the girls both support and resist hegemonic discourses about femin...

Building on qualitative research about sexualisation by media and culture and the impact on girls' development, in this article we present a discourse analysis of three focus groups of teen girls of colour and of diverse ethnicities asked to talk about sexiness. We focus on the ways the girls both support and resist hegemonic discourses about femin...

This commentary explores questions raised by Bay-Cheng's BAgency Matrix^ regarding girls' and young women's sexual agency. Focusing primarily on victimization and agency, I explore past attempts in the field to understand victim's agency from my own work (Lamb, 1996) and the work of Janoff-Bulman and Frieze (1983) in the 80s and 90s to more recent...

Building on research about sexualization in media, body image, and its impact on the development of girls of color, we present a discourse analysis of what the members of three focus groups of teen girls of color, primarily daughters of immigrants, said when asked to talk about what it means to them to be sexy, and about their perceptions of media...

This study explored the perspectives of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women on the sexualization of women in media. Three focus groups at a Northeast university were attended by 12 sexual minority women who talked about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences related to sexualization. An interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed themes rel...

In this essay Sharon Lamb considers how progressives have begun to win the longstanding battle to shape sex education and what they have had to give up in the process. After framing the battle in historical context, Lamb uses discourse analysis to explore the hidden values in the “evidence-based” (EB) curricula that progressives currently favor and...

Sexualization of girlhood is a current issue in the US and around the world. Concerns that girls are asked to self-sexualize at younger and younger ages have led to an examination of the influence of media on girls. The current study attempts to explore public views on the ‘self-sexualization’ of a Disney pop star, Miley Cyrus, in what was called a...

Since Michelle Fine's writing on the missing discourse of desire in sex education, there has been considerable prompting among sexuality educators and feminist scholars to incorporate talk of pleasure into sex education curricula. While the calls for inclusion continue, few have actually examined the curricula for a pleasure discourse or explored h...

Although all feminists tend to value empowered female sexuality, feminists often disagree, sometimes heatedly so, about the definition of and path to empowered sexuality among adolescent girls. In this theoretical paper, two feminists, who have previously expressed differing perspectives regarding adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment (Lamb 2010a, b...

In our joint theoretical piece (Lamb and Peterson 2011), we attempted to find points of agreement and further elucidate points of disagreement in relation to the challenging issue of adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment. In particular, we evaluated the divisive question of whether girls’ subjective feelings of sexual empowerment qualify as some use...

The literature on forgiveness is prevalent with assumptions about negative emotions that remain unexplored and assumptions about the applicability of forgiveness goals to all kinds of people, to all groups, no matter how wounded or harmed. In addition, the alternative practices have rarely been explored beside forgiveness therapy, and other religio...

This book argues that forgiveness has been accepted as a therapeutic strategy without serious, critical examination. It hopes to provide a closer, critical look at some of these questions: why is forgiveness so popular now? What exactly does it entail? When might it be appropriate for a therapist not to advise forgiveness? When is forgiveness in fa...

It has long been noted that sexuality education curricula contain gender stereotypes and heterosexism that may be harmful to people of all genders. Many of the stereotypes and sources of heterosexism that have been discussed in the literature have to do with old-fashioned and restrictive roles for men and women and focus on heterosexual sex and mar...

Critics of sex education curricula have written about a ‘hidden curriculum’ that presupposes a ‘normal’ adolescent. This hidden curriculum assumes that adolescents are heterosexual, gender stereotyped, ruled by hormones, impulsive, and unthoughtful about sex. Thus, adolescents are given the kind of curriculum that would apply to this narrow stereot...

For over a decade, battles have raged between conservative Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) sexuality education advocates and liberal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) advocates. While these battles have focused on the inclusion of health information about contraception and whether or not a curriculum must advocate abstinence as the best...

Feminist researchers in psychology and education have been theorizing about the kind of sexuality girls ought to have. They are not afraid to investigate morality and what makes a good life. While they explore the meaning and cultural context of girls' sexual development, the good sexual life they describe may be an elusive ideal that, in the end,...

In my article on the idealization of female adolescent sexuality, I raised questions for feminist theorists and researchers about our theorizing about “desire”, “pleasure”, and “subjectivity”. Zoe Peterson’s commentary on this article responds to one of 5 critical points I make, that the description of the ideal sexual adolescent who feels pleasure...

Reply by the current author to the comments made by Robin Connors (see record 2013-42839-019), Linda Damon (see record 2013-42839-020) and Jean J. Lyons (see record 2013-42839-021) on the original article, Treating Sexually Abused Children: Issues of Blame and Responsibility by Sharon Lamb (1986). Sharon Lamb wanted to redress an imbalance she saw...

Reviews the book, The sexualization of childhood edited by Sharna Olfman (see record 2009-01649-000 ). The Sexualization of Childhood provides a loud alarm, with chapters that extend the discussion further into pornography and child prostitution than we would ever want to go. Pitching to an academic audience, the chapter authors describe what resea...

This paper explores the ideals of healthy sexuality for teenage girls in the U.S. proposed by feminist theorists and researchers. Current ideals emphasize desire, pleasure, and subjectivity, and appear to be a response to three historically problematic areas for women and girls: objectification; abuse and victimization; and stereotypes of female pa...

The present study tested the hypothesis that viewing images of women posed as sexy young girls can lead to greater acceptance of child sexual abuse myths. Sixty-five participants were randomly assigned to three groups: the control group who viewed "Nature" ads, the "Sexy Adult" group who viewed ads of adult women, and the "Sexy Child" group who vie...

My focus is on how forgiveness therapies affect women. This interest arose from my work on issues of blame and responsibility in cases of abuse and victimization and from an observation that those advocating forgiveness therapy, many of whom are white men, use female victims of rape and sexual abuse as examples of those victims who may want unilate...

People do great wrongs to each other all the time, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. This resource looks at how people, communities, and nations can address great wrongs and how they can heal from them - taking into consideration how differences in cultures, histories, and group expectations affect the possibilities for healing.

The forgiveness advocacy movement in the field of psychology focuses on relief from one kind of trauma: an individual’s psychological wounds that can arise after a victimization. But there is another kind of injury that victims suffer, wounds not merely based on personal harm but based on an injustice done to them as representatives of a group. In...

This study was designed to examine coping strategies for relational aggression. Ninety-eight female middle- and high-school students completed the Revised Ways of Coping Scale (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985) and reported characteristics of a relational aggressive act of which they were the victim and characteristics of their friendship before and after t...

This paper is a critique of forgiveness therapy that focuses on the cultural contexts in which forgiveness therapy arose, with a special focus on the movement to address the victimization of women. I describe forgiveness as described by forgiveness therapy advocates and the moral and non-moral benefits claimed on its behalf. I then describe the cul...

Review of book: Dylan Evans, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-285433-X. Reviewed by Sharon Lamb. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Describes the difficulties inherent in asking women to forgive given women's gendered role in relationships. Female victims in particular ought not to be persuaded to forgive for the sake of either reforming the perpetrator or healing themselves. Holding both anger as well as compassion simultaneously, not ridding oneself of either nor insisting on...

L July of 1998 Psychological Bulletin published a eta-analysis of the long-term impact of child sexual abuse on college students. The article sought to debunk a belief that had gained widespread currency in mental health culture: that childhood sexual abuse was inevitably traumatic and inevitably led to later mental health problems. Most controvers...

This paper argues for an integration of moral education and sex education curricula. In such an integration, the primary values that would be taught would not be those relating to specific sexual behaviour but those relating to the general treatment of human beings, suggesting that sex that involves coercion or exploitation as well as sex that caus...

The present study examines in toddlers one of the most crucial components of empathy—attention to distress, and, in particular, attention to distress in a daycare setting where others' distress is a frequent occurrence. Characteristics of the child such as age, gender, and frequency of self-distress, and characteristics of the distress incident its...

Replies to H. N. Garb's (see record 1996-08172-001) criticism that D. Becker and S. Lamb (see record 1994-29756-001) overlooked previous studies of sex bias in the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and overinterpreted their findings. The authors address specific methodological criticisms and discuss their study's strengths (e.g., the i...

Replies to H. N. Garb's (see record 1996-08172-001) criticism that D. Becker and S. Lamb (see record 1994-29756-001) overlooked previous studies of sex bias in the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and overinterpreted their findings. The authors address specific methodological criticisms and discuss their study's strengths (e.g., the inc...

In an earlier article, Lamb (1991) showed that journal authors, when writing about men battering women, wrote in a way that avoided assigning responsibility to men as perpetrators, and that this kind of writing was more common among male authors as well as female authors who wrote with men. This study examines first whether this kind of writing occ...

Developing through relationships: Origins of communication, self, and culture. AlanFogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. - Volume 16 Issue 2 - Sharon Lamb

This research investigates the relationship between disclosure and adult outcome. In the study, 60 volunteers completed a phone interview regarding their history of sexual abuse, history of repeated disclosures, and current socioemotional functioning. Number of disclosures and number of positive disclosures were not related to adult functioning as...

Questioned the existence of sex bias in the clinical diagnosis of both borderline personality disorder (BPD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists ( N = 1,080) were asked in a mail survey to assess the applicability of a number of diagnoses to a case tailored to include equal numbers of criteria...

Recent recognition of child-to-child and adolescent-to-child sexual abuse raises the question, for the courts, educators, clinicians, and lay individuals, where do we draw the line between normal childhood sexual play, and abuse. This paper presents the results of a survey on normative childhood sexual play and games experiences that was distribute...

While there has been considerable observational work demonstrating that children in the second year of life show signs of moral development, few studies have commented on the nature of the emergence of these signs. This paper, through a longitudinal study of four toddlers, examines the emergence of several signs of moral awareness and their relatio...

Comments on P. Cushman's (see record 1991-17982-001) critique of D. Stern's (1985) book concerning the interpersonal world of the human infant. S. Lamb defends psychoanalytic theory, arguing that the theory has been forced to reflect on itself from a social/constructionist viewpoint. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Comments on P. Cushman's (see record 1991-17982-001) critique of D. Stern's (1985) book concerning the interpersonal world of the human infant. S. Lamb defends psychoanalytic theory, arguing that the theory has been forced to reflect on itself from a social/constructionist viewpoint.

This paper, through a longitudinal study of four toddlers, examines the regularities in order and age of acquisition of internal state words in relation to emergence of signs of moral awareness and affect. Increases in internal state words occurred after children's peaks in awareness of standards and after the first signs of empathy. Maternal commu...

Articles on abuse of women by men were surveyed in eleven journals across four disciplines. Introductory sections from 46 articles were coded for linguistic choices—such as use of the passive voice, nominalization, and diffuse terminology—that obscure the attribution of responsibility. In half or more of the references to abuse, sentence structure...

Reviews the books, Child Development Within Culturally Structured Environments: Parental Cognition and Adult-Child Interaction (Vol. 1) by Jaan Valsiner (Ed.) (1988); and Child Development Within Culturally Structured Environments: Social Co-Construction and Environmental Guidance in Development (Vol. 2) by Jaan Valsiner (Ed.) (1988). The contribut...

In a study of children's moral development, four toddlers and their mothers were observed at home approximately every three weeks when toddlers were 13-23 months of age. Six behavioral signs of children's awareness of standards were coded: (1) proud looks, achievement smiles, statements of accomplishment; (2) awareness of, interest in, and exclamat...

The Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) is a 35-item screening questionnaire that is completed by parents and designed to help pediatricians in outpatient practice identify school-age children with difficulties in psychosocial functioning. The current study assessed the validity of the PSC by screening 300 children in two pediatric practices, a middl...

"The Emergence of Morality in Young Children is one of very few scholarly books concerning the development of moral tendencies in the early years. In its pages, a diverse group of eminent social and behavioral scientists address this fascinating topic and struggle with issues of inquiry that have persistently plagued this field."—Nancy Eisenberg,...

It is proposed that clinicians refrain from telling sexually abused children that the experience of abuse was "not their fault," since such well-intentioned assurances can diminish the sense of power and control that the children may feel in addition to their guilt. Affirming children's sense of power rather than their status as victims may have fu...

Surveyed the attitudes toward women and motherhood of 36 female and 29 male mental health professionals (mean age 29 yrs) in community-based programs for adolescents, using the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and a motherhood inventory. Ss included 15 family and 50 nonfamily counselors. It was found that family counselors had more liberal attitudes to...

Looks at our current definition of victim; what is required from victims and what the implications of these conceptualizations are. The author examines the type of pathology that victims are required to develop and how being victimized has become equivalent to having a chronic mental illness. This pathology begins with a reading of the victim's bod...