Working with Children and Young People who have displayed Harmful Sexual Behaviour

Allardyce Stuart

Description

In providing clear practice messages for practitioners, contemporary issues such as problematic online sexual behaviour and adolescent harmful sexual behaviour are covered and a formulation-based, trauma-informed and multi-systemic approach to working with children and their families is proposed.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Child protection
• Child abuse

Informations

• Publié par: Dunedin Academic Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780465845
• Langue: English

Extrait

Working with Children and Young People Who Have Displayed Harmful Sexual Behaviour
Stuart Allardyce
National Manager of Stop it Now! Scotland
Peter Yates
Lecturer in Child and Public Protection, Edinburgh Napier University
Contents
Acknowledgements
The authors
Foreword
Introduction
1 Attitudes and values
2 Childhood sexualities
3 Prevalence, characteristics and backgrounds
4 Aetiology
5 Assessment
6 Interventions
7 Special populations
8 Harmful sexual behaviour online
9 Prevention
References
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend particular thanks to Julie Taylor for her endless enthusiasm, encouragement and invaluable guidance and support throughout the writing of this book. We are also grateful to our families for their infinite patience. All errors are our own, but we would like to thank the following generous colleagues for their comments, feedback and expert advice on particular sections of the book: Stephen Barry, Kevin Creeden, Donald Findlater, Sarah Graham, Richard Ingram, Lorraine Johnstone, Angela McCann, Ethel Quayle, Phil Rich, Berit Ritchie, Rowena Rossiter and Lisa Thornhill. We also wish to sincerely thank the many children and young people we have worked with over the years, along with their families, from whom we have learnt so much. This book is dedicated to them.
The authors
Stuart Allardyce is a qualified social worker who has specialised as a practitioner and manager in working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour for more than fifteen years. He is national manager of the child protection charity Stop it Now! Scotland. Additionally, he is chair of the National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers (NOTA) Scotland, chair of the NOTA UK and Republic of Ireland Policy and Practice Committee and a trustee of White Ribbon Scotland. He is an associate at the Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice at Strathclyde University.
Dr Peter Yates is a lecturer in child and public protection at Edinburgh Napier University. He is a qualified social worker with more than ten years’ experience of child protection, having worked in a local authority children and families practice team followed by four years as a senior practitioner within a specialist service for young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. His particular research interests within this field include sibling sexual abuse and victim crossover, and he has published and presented at international conferences on these subjects.
Foreword
Sexual abuse is currently high on the societal agenda in many countries of the world. In the UK, as in the USA, a string of high-profile cases involving ‘celebrity perpetrators’ has brought the widespread nature of sexual harassment and sexual abuse firmly into the public consciousness. All national jurisdictions across the UK have ongoing or recently concluded public inquiries into historical abuse, though the course of these inquiries has so far proved to be far from straightforward.
While media attention given to recent high-profile cases may have increased the number of people coming forward to disclose their experiences of abuse, one of the problems with most of the public discourses that have emerged so far about sexual abuse is that they have tended to reinforce a stereotypical image of adult paedophiles preying on vulnerable children. Consequently, the very significant proportion of all child sexual abuse perpetrated not only by adults but also by other children has been downplayed. Even when reports of child- and adolescent-perpetrated child sexual abuse gain media attention, it is within a frame that presents the children as mini versions of adult sex offenders, or ‘paedophiles in waiting’. The reality is somewhat different. In the largest UK study of 700 children and young people who had sexually abused others, we found that 50% had themselves been victims of sexual abuse and 50% had experienced physical abuse or domestic violence in their backgrounds (Hackett et al. , 2013). For many, their histories of abuse and their own offending behaviour were part and parcel of an enmeshed experience of trauma, neglect and pain. When seen through this lens, we need to respond to them as much as children in need of protection as children in need of criminalisation.
Lack of awareness of the issue of children and young people who harm others sexually promotes a distorted and stereotypical view of child sexual abuse, overplaying some risks (such as ‘stranger danger’) and underplaying others (for example, that most risk of sexual harm to children exists within families by people of all ages known to them). Failing to understand the specific needs of children and young people who present with harmful sexual behaviour also means that they are more likely to receive inappropriate criminal justice responses, such as sex-offender registration or community notification policies designed with adult sex offenders in mind but then applied by default to minors. Such measures, being inherently adult focused, at best fail to provide a balanced response to the issue of harmful sexual behaviour and, at worst, they may cause irreparable developmental damage to children who are drawn into their requirements (Pittman, 2013).
This book addresses this important topic with sensitivity. The authors start by exploring the important topic of how emotions, attitudes and values may impact on the professional response to the problem of children and young people’s harmful sexual behaviour. They examine harmful sexual behaviour in the context of childhood sexualities, address the question of why such behaviour emerges in childhood and what the professional system can do to focus its assessment and intervention responses and to prevent the problem from occurring. At a time when a better-informed picture about the realities of child sexual abuse is urgently needed, this book provides a vital part of this complex jigsaw.
Professor Simon Hackett Professor of Child Abuse and Neglect, Durham University and Chair of NOTA UK and Republic of Ireland
Introduction
While estimates of prevalence vary between countries, around 19% of girls and 8% of boys worldwide will have experienced contact sexual abuse by the age of eighteen (Pereda et al. , 2009b; Stoltenborgh et al. , 2011). Impact varies from individual to individual, but a range of studies show that sexual abuse in childhood is associated with substantially compromised mental and physical health outcomes that can endure into adulthood (e.g. Davidson and Omar, 2014; Irish et al. , 2009; Kisiel et al. , 2014; Sawyerr and Bagley, 2017). Child sexual abuse is, therefore, increasingly being recognised as a widespread public health concern in contemporary society.
There is also growing awareness among researchers and childcare professionals that not all sexual abuse is perpetrated by adults. Since the 1990s various studies have shown that a significant proportion of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by children under the age of eighteen. Indeed, Hackett et al. (2016) estimate that at least one-third of all sexual offences against children in the UK are committed by other children.
Understanding that children and young people can be perpetrators as well as victims of sexual abuse is a challenging notion for both professionals and the public. It is a social issue that raises many questions that are difficult to answer, such as:
• How should this behaviour be conceptualised when displayed by children and young people?
• What are the most effective responses to situations where children and young people have acted in these ways?
• How do we prevent this form of abuse occurring in the first place?
This book sets out to answer these questions.
Children’s rights and harmful sexual behaviour
We believe that many incidents involving sexual abuse perpetrated by children and young people are serious crimes, and proportionate management of the genuine risks that these individuals present will be necessary. However, drawing on the definition of childhood set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989), we also believe that those under the age of eighteen who display this behaviour need to be seen as children first and foremost. Throughout this book we use the term ‘young people’ when referring to individuals aged 12–18 and ‘children’ when referring to individuals below the age of twelve. Nonetheless, we believe that all individuals under the age of eighteen are children, and as such deserve particular protection from harm and abuse. Preventing children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour from abusing further victims is a key safeguarding goal. However, children and young people who have displayed this behaviour also need to be protected, and – like their victims – have a right to nurture, respect, family life, education and social inclusion. We contend that responses to children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour need to be embedded in a robust children’s rights perspective, even when their actions have caused considerable harm to others.
It may appear obvious to state that children are different from adults, with distinct needs and vulnerabilities arising from their developmental status. Nonetheless, it remains the case that children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour are often responded to in ways that are shaped fundamentally by the assessment and risk management of adult sex offenders. This is partly because research and practice focusing on this client group emerged in the 1980s as an adjunct to clinical practice with adult sex offenders. Since then, research has conclusively shown that children and young people represent a distinct population from adults who commit sexual offences, and pathways into – and out of – this behaviour are very different for children when compared to adults (