Abstract
This article describes a novel method of evaluating claims of sexual abuse in custody/visitation disputes wherein the wife is both the accuser and the alleged victim. The method relies on a perceptual bias for abuse imagery that characterizes the perceptual processing of Rorschach stimuli by women with histories of sexual abuse. Results demonstrated that abuse imagery was significantly related to the personal experience of sexual abuse (68.4% of women alleging marital sexual abuse and 77.8% of sexually traumatized women with a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). By comparison, the incidence of abuse imagery was strikingly low (6.4%) among women whose exposure to sexual abuse stemmed from parenting a child alleging paternal sexual abuse. This custody sample was indistinguishable from a non-custody sample of women (7.9%) matched for a history of no sexual abuse. The findings support the premise that preoccupation with sexual abuse does not affect the perception of people who have not personally experienced sexual abuse. In balancing the charges and countercharges that permeate custody disputes, those investigating and evaluating claims of spousal sexual abuse may find perceptual information, that is unrelated to common knowledge, a valuable data source.