Sexual exploitation is becoming endemic in our society. It involves victims being coerced to enter abusive sexual relationships with individuals or gangs. It can occur with children from care homes – or from more privileged backgrounds. Sexual exploitation is so addictive that it is really difficult to extract the victims. This is the first book that we are aware of that examines exploitation using a psychoanalytic framework which makes the behaviour and motives of victims and, in some cases, exploiters comprehensible. The book looks at a range of situations from care homes to refugee camps and elite schools. We expect this book to become indispensable for social workers, psychotherapists, counsellors, and care workers who have to tackle child sexual exploitation. Giving up an addiction is a struggle. Our clinical examples show how much and what kinds of work are needed to start to release girls from their addiction to their exploiters. The roots of vulnerability lie in an attack on the maternal function. This is reflected in the huge expansion of day-care taking children from as little as three months old. Care for mothers and children can be transformed. We demonstrate how powerful properly organised maternal-type care can be, to give young people a sound start to their lives.

The issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE) has received intense scrutiny in recent years, following a number of high profile legal cases, serious case reviews and inquiries. This has resulted in increasing expectations that those working in the field will know how to appropriately manage and respond to this form of abuse. Of course, this is no easy task given the widely acknowledged difficulties of identifying and responding to sexual abuse and the particular complexities associated with the gain dynamic within CSE and the predominantly older age of children affected by it. This edited collection draws on the latest research evidence and academic thinking around CSE to consider issues of understanding and response. Written by researchers from ‘The International Centre: Researching child sexual exploitation, violence and trafficking’ at the University of Bedfordshire, Part I considers issues of understanding and conceptualisation. Part II considers the practical implications of some of this thinking, sharing learning from research and evaluation on prevention, identification and response. Understanding and Responding to Child Exploitation presents critical learning for academics and students, and for those working in the fields of policy, practice and commissioning. It is relevant to a wide range of disciplines including social care, youth work, education, criminology, health and social policy.

This important and wide-ranging book explores the world of a child or young person who has been abused or neglected. It seeks to understand their world, to ease the pain from which they suffer, and to heal the wounds that the abuse has left. Examining how abuse always takes place in the context of relationships, and involves a misuse of power that causes a traumatic overwhelming of the child or adolescent, abuse also evokes strong countertransference. This affects interventions, particularly when clinicians struggle with feelings of which they may feel ashamed. A difficulty in coming to terms with and addressing child abuse relates to unconscious factors which, by freezing the emotional area surrounding the abuse (or by blinding the area of personality), makes some thoughts unthinkable. Considering traditional and novel ways of helping children who feel they have been maltreated, the book offers suggestions for individual treatment as well as describing the successful work carried out with child refugees. It also offers a glimpse into what child psychoanalysts interpret and do with children who feel a parent hates them.

This book examines the representation of child sexual abuse in five American novels written from 1850 to the present. The historical range of the novels shows that child sexual abuse is not a new problem, although it has been called by other names in other eras. The introduction explains what literature and literary criticism bring to persistent questions that arise when children are sexually abused. Psychoanalytic concepts developed by Freud, Ferenczi, Kohut, and Lacan inform readings of the novels. Theories of trauma, shame, psychosis, and perversion provide insights into the characters represented in the stories. Each chapter is guided by a difficult question that has arisen from real-life situations of child sexual abuse. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to these questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework that can significantly inform those responses.

The author, working from the Family Institute in Cardiff, has been treating adult survivors of child sexual and physical abuse for several years, and she has clearly and frankly described her work in this book. She begins be describing the context for working with her clients; then describes the way she has welded systemic thinking and a feminist perspective into a theoretical model she uses to understand the problem and to guide her own work with the survivors. The descriptions of the therapeutic process are, at the same time, profound and simply conveyed. Her work is further clarified by the inclusion of twenty case examples. She shares her own dilemmas about working with adult survivors, and in this way the book offers the reader support for the emotional impact of this work as well as a theoretical framework and suggestions about therapeutic technique.

This is the second edition of a handbook for survivors of child sexual abuse and their helpers, featuring added material on the acknowledgement of survivors' strengths, the effect of sexual abuse on adult female sexuality and therapeutic themes.

This book offers a re-evaluation of mainstream and feminist approaches to understanding the theories and research issues relating to women and child sexual abuse.