Abstract:

The article presents the study on the manifestations of actualised victimhood and the dominant strategies of victim behaviour used by adolescents with disabilities and their correlations with some parental attitudes.

The study involved 110 adolescents with disabilities: body disorders caused by diseases or psychical disabilities, who studied in public and private secondary schools in Kyiv city, Kyiv and Luhansk regions. Their age was 11-12 years.

The following psychological methods were used in the study: O.O. Andronnikova’s method of “Predisposition to victim behaviour”, “Adolescents about parents” (E. Schaefer’s ADOR, adapted by L.I. Vasserman, I.A. Gorkova, E.E. Romitsina) and the authors’ questionnaire to determine situational factors.

Adolescents with disabilities have high victimhood, which indicates their high vulnerability and tendency to get into dangerous situations, to feel like victims of circumstances. The dominant maladaptive strategies of victim behaviour used by them were aggressive, uncritical and passive ones. These strategies are protective as for their nature and are manifested as aggression, uncritical assessment of own actions and actions of other people, indifference and alienation.

The peculiarities of parental attitudes (fathers’ and mothers’) to adolescents with disabilities are an important external factor of victim behaviour. Mothers’ attitudes are characterised by autonomy, expressed in demonstrated supervision, the desire to control her children and keep them within certain limits; hostility and directiveness, manifested in excessive severity, ignoring the needs and desires of their children, attempts to prevent norm violations by their children via demonstration of mothers’ own rightness. Fathers’ attitudes towards adolescents with disabilities are characterised by autonomy, manifested as a focus on the formal aspects of upbringing and control, and inconsistency, as unpredictable alternations from the demand for strength, ambitions to indulgence, excessive altruism and as insufficient attention to adolescents’ feelings, insufficient kindness and openness in communication.

We have found that the emergence and actuation of victim behaviour by adolescents with disabilities is related to their parents’ attitudes to them. In particular, adolescents’ victimhood is linked with such mothers’ attitudes to their sons as aggression, severity, dominance in communications, criticism and with such mothers’ attitudes to their daughters as excessive distance, emotional isolation and coldness. Fathers’ attitudes to their son influencing adolescents’ victimhood are constant control, severity and criticism; fathers’ attitudes to their daughters are severity and high demands in combination with emotional coldness, rejection and unpredictability of reactions to actions. These attitudes contribute to the emergence of self-destructive, proactive and uncritical strategies used by adolescents.

Keywords:

Adolescents’ victimhood, victim behaviour, maladaptive strategies of victim behaviour, parental attitude.